The Strange Disappearance of SallyAnne Perks
by Paimpont
Summary: Harry recalls that a pale little girl called Sally-Anne was sorted into Hufflepuff during his first year, but no one else remembers her. Was there really a Sally-Anne? Harry and Hermione set out to solve the chilling mystery of the lost Hogwarts student.
1. Chapter 1

_The Disappearance of Sally-Anne Perks_

_Summary:_

_Harry recalls that a pale little girl called Sally-Anne was sorted into Hufflepuff during his first year, but no one else seems to remember her. Not only is Sally-Anne no longer at Hogwarts; there is no trace of her in the school records, and the professors claim she never existed. Was there really a Sally-Anne? Harry and Hermione set out to solve the chilling mystery of the lost Hogwarts student._

_..._

**There weren't many people left now. "Moon" "Nott" "Parkinson" then a pair of twin girls, "Patil" and "Patil" then "Perks, Sally-Anne" and then, at last - "Potter, Harry!" (_Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_, Chapter 7)**

**Ten minutes later, Professor Flitwick called, "Parkinson, Pansy - Patil, Padma - Patil, Parvati - Potter, Harry." (_Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix_, Chapter 31)**

_~At some point between September 1991 and the spring of 1996, Sally-Anne Perks left Hogwarts. Perhaps she dropped out of school. Perhaps she fell ill. Perhaps she died. Or maybe she just vanished..._

_..._

There was a hint of chill in the October evenings. The days were still warm and golden, but at night they could feel frost in the air, an icy breath of the winter that was to come.

Harry, Ron, and Hermione were curled up in front of the fire in the Gryffindor common room. The warmth and the quiet murmuring sounds of the flames were making them comfortably drowsy. Even Hermione had let her book sink down into her lap for a moment and gazed dreamily into the fire.

Harry inhaled the spicy, woodsy scent of the burning hickory and tried to make out shapes in the fire. How many colors there were in the crackling flames! He had always thought of fire as orange; but now he noticed that the dancing flames had all kinds of hues; ocher, amber, shades of deep gold and flaming red, and now and then a flicker of an incandescent blue.

"I can see a pyramid," he mumbled sleepily. "See it? Right there, where the flames lick up a little higher?"

Ron leaned his head to one side, considering. "Nah," he declared finally. "It's not a pyramid at all - it's the Sorting Hat!"

Harry and Hermione laughed a little, but agreed willingly that there was something hat-shaped about the flickering flame.

"I'll never forget how nervous I was the day when we were sorted," said Hermione softly. "More than two years ago..."

"Me too," put in Ron. "I was sure it was going to put me in Slytherin!" He made a face. "My parents would have disowned me."

Harry smiled, but said nothing about his own fears on that day. Perhaps some other time... "I think we were all scared," he said quietly. Even Malfoy looked uncomfortable, and that pale little girl, Sally-Anne Perks, looked like she was going to faint..."

Hermione frowned. "Sally-Anne? Who's that?"

Harry looked at her curiously. "Sally-Anne Perks, the girl who was sorted right before me. She was sorted into Hufflepuff, remember?"

But the look of recollection and recognition he was waiting for never came. Hermione merely shook her head, baffled. "What are you talking about, Harry? There was no Sally-Anne."

"Of course there was. How can you not remember her? You usually remember everything." Suddenly a thought struck him. "Wait, how odd - I don't recall seeing her much after that... How strange, I never thought much about her. I noticed her when she was getting sorted, because her last name was right before mine, and I knew that my turn would be coming soon. But I don't actually remember seeing her since that day. She was a Hufflepuff, but she was never in any of our classes. She must have left school shortly after the sorting... I wonder why."

Then he noticed a very odd look on Ron's face.

"What? What is it, Ron? Oh... Did you hear what happened to her? Was it something - something _bad?_"

Harry felt a stab of pity for the long-forgotten Sally-Anne. He remembered a thin, little face, so pale it seemed almost translucent, light blue eyes widened in fear, a sprinkling of freckles over her nose, hands clutching the edges of the stool as she sat down, waiting for the sorting hat to descend upon her head. He hoped that nothing bad had happened to her, no sickness or terrible accident. Perhaps she had simply been so homesick that her parents had taken her home?

"Harry, what are you talking about? _There was no Sally-Anne_." Ron was looking at him with an expression of concern, but suddenly Harry realized that it was for _him_, and not for Sally-Anne.

Harry began to wonder if he was dreaming. "Oh, don't tell me that you don't remember her either! She was sorted right before me. Perks, Sally-Anne. And then me: Potter, Harry."

"Harry-?" Hermione's hand was on his arm now. Her voice was gentle. "Harry, what is this? What are you talking about? I remember the sorting as well as you do, every moment of it. It was the hour when our destinies were decided; how could I forget any of it?"

She took a deep breath. "Harry, what is happening to you? Are you hallucinating? _There never was a Sally-Anne. You were sorted right after the Patil twins."_

In spite of the heat from the fire, Harry felt an icy shiver. _Something was terribly wrong._

He shook his head, stubbornly. What was wrong with Ron and Hermione? How could they have forgotten her, simply because she had left school after... after how long, exactly? He tried to remember if he had ever seen her again. No, they hadn't had any classes with the Hufflepuffs until the second year, and by then she was gone.

He got up abruptly.

"Where are you going?" Why was there such an anxious look on Hermione's face?

"To the Hufflepuff common room." Harry tried to keep his voice steady. "Someone there will remember her, even if she wasn't here for very long."

...

But the Hufflepuffs did not remember Sally-Anne.

Much to his surprise, Harry was able to enter their common room in the cellar without a password; he walked up to the door, and it opened before him. He looked bewildered around the cozy circular room with the deep, comfortable armchairs and the gold tapestries on the wall. Wasn't something supposed to stop him from entering?

Then he heard a soft silvery laugh. Susan Bones was looking at him with amusement.

"It's all right, Harry. There _is_ no password."

"No password? But what keeps unwelcome visitors away, then?"

Susan smiled, dimples showing in her round, pink cheeks. "What keeps them away are their own assumptions. Like the assumption that there is a password."

"Oh." Harry began to feel a growing respect for the Hufflepuffs.

Susan closed her book. "Some things," she said softly, "are too difficult to comprehend. But more often, people don't understand because _things are too simple. _Like our password."

Her smile grew mischievous. "What can I do for you, Harry, now that you have broken our secret code by wandering in through the door?"

A few of the other Hufflepuffs had gathered round them by now. Ernie MacMillan, Hannah Abbot, Justin Finch-Fletchley...

Harry looked around at the friendly faces. He drew his breath deeply. "I was wondering if you remember a girl called Sally-Anne?"

A look of gentle confusion spread over their pleasant faces. They shook their heads, asked a few curious questions and answered his in return. No, no one had ever heard of Sally-Anne Perks. Yes, they remembered the sorting, of course they did; who could forget?

Harry grew exasperated. _He wasn't mad, she had existed... _But the Hufflepuffs were looking at him with expressions of innocent bewilderment; they knew nothing of Sally-Anne.

"Tell me," he said finally, "how many girls were sorted into Hufflepuff in our first year."

It was Hannah Abbot who answered, the sweet girl with pigtails. "Four. There were four of us, Harry. Susan Bones, Leanne Robinson, Megan Jones, and me."

Harry studied her face. No, there was no deception in it. "But weren't there _five _girls and five boys sorted into each house?" he asked, desperately. "Gryffindor had five girls, Ravenclaw had five, and Slytherin had five as well. Why would Hufflepuff have _four_ girls and five boys?"

Hannah looked baffled. "I don't know," she said slowly. "Coming to thing of it, that really wasn't fair, was it? Perhaps it was yet another example of people shortchanging the Hufflepuffs."

There was a murmur of agreement, and Harry gave up. He thanked the Hufflepuff students and went back to Gryffindor Tower.

Ron and Hermione were still sitting on the floor in front of the fire, but a few feet apart now. Had they had an argument? Hermione looked up at him as he entered.

"What did you find out, Harry?"

He shook his head. "Nothing much. They don't remember her either. But they _do _think it odd that there were only four Hufflepuff girls in our year, and five in the other houses."

Hermione looked thoughtful, but Ron simply stretched and yawned: "Well, if the Hufflepuffs don't remember her, then she didn't get sorted into Hufflepuff, did she? You just imagined her, Harry. Don't worry, mate, it's easy to get confused - that first day at Hogwarts was overwhelming for all of us. Hard to keep things straight."

"_I did not imagine her!" _

But Ron merely shrugged at Harry's outburst of anger, shook his head and wandered off. Soon, he had engaged Neville in a game of exploding snap in the far corner of the common room, and by the looks of Neville's singed robes, Ron was winning by a good margin.

Harry turned his glance away from Ron and stared into the fire. Why couldn't Ron _try_ to believe him, just for a minute? His memory of Sally-Anne, so vivid a little while ago, began to blur in the face of Ron's blatant disbelief. _Had_ he just imagined her? Was she a figment of his imagination, like the outline of the pyramid he had glimpsed in the fire?

"Harry, let's go and see McGonagall." Hermione's voice, intruding on his thoughts, had a determined ring to it.

Harry looked up at her, uncomprehending. "McGonagall? Why do we need to see McGonagall?"

There was a look of both exasperation and tenderness on Hermione's face as she answered: "_Why?_ To ask her about Sally-Anne, of course."

"You believe me then-?" Harry's voice came out as a whisper.

"I don't know _what _I believe, Harry," said Hermione softly. "I don't know if there was a Sally-Anne or not. But I do believe that you have a vivid recollection of someone that the rest of us don't remember, and that is in itself very odd. And the number of girls sorted into Hufflepuff that year... I never thought about it before, but you are right: There should have been one more. Have you ever noticed that the new students are always sorted evenly into each of the four houses? There is something about the very magic of Hogwarts itself, and perhaps of the Sorting Hat as well, that strives for balance, for symmetry: The four houses need to be equal in strength, equal in number... There _can't _have been only four Hufflepuff girls." She swallowed. "And therefore, it makes sense that one must be missing... Let's see McGonagall, Harry; she was in charge of the sorting."

She reached out her hand, and Harry grasped it gratefully. They walked through the by now deserted ancient corridors in silence.

"Enter!" Professor McGonagall's brisk voice answered their hesitant knock.

"Ah, Mr. Potter and Miss Granger!" McGonagall's kind homely face lit up at the sight of them. "What can I do for you? Isn't it a little late for you two to be up?"

Then, as she saw their faces, she added quickly. "Sit down, children. Is something wrong?"

Harry and Hermione sank down in the chairs she offered them. Harry took a deep breath.

"Professor, do you remember the day we were sorted, Hermione and I?"

McGonagall put the quill she had been holding down on her desk and beamed at them. "Of course I do, Mr. Potter. How could I forget the day when Harry Potter was sorted into my house?" Harry felt himself smile at the pride in her voice. McGonagall added quickly: "And you too, of course, Miss Granger. Harry had been preceded by his reputation, of course, but you I did not know yet. But I pride myself on being able to read a child's character and ability in their face, and you have lived up to the promise your determined little face held that evening."

"Professor," Harry asked quietly. "Do you remember the Hufflepuff students? Do you remember a girl named Sally-Anne Perks?"

Was it his imagination, or did McGonagall's hand tremble for a second? No, it must have been an illusion; her hand was steady and her voice clear and firm as she answered, with a note of surprise in her voice: "Sally-Anne Perks? In Hufflepuff? No, there was no such student, Harry."

"But I _remember _her!"

McGonagall looked surprised at his violent outburst. "Remember her? No, you must be mistaken, Harry." She smiled at him, a tender, almost motherly smile. "Sometimes our minds play tricks on us, Harry. But I think I can put your mind to rest."

She got up and retrieved a heavy leather-covered book from a locked cabinet on the wall. "Look, Harry, these are the Hogwarts records; I am assigned as keeper of this book. The name of all students who ever enter Hogwarts are magically recorded here, along with their houses and their sorting dates, exam results, and so forth."

She opened the ancient volume and began to leaf through it. "Let us see now; you were sorted in 1991, on the first day of September. Ah, here we are. Patil, Padma. Patil, Parvati. Potter, Harry. Take a look, Harry. You can see for yourself that there was no Miss... Perkins, did you say?"

"Perks."

"Ah, yes. Perks. And as you can see from the Hufflepuff lists from 1991, there were only four girls sorted into Hufflepuff that year. And here are the class lists; as you can see, there was no Miss Perks in any of the classes offered that fall."

"Oh." Harry sank back in his chair, wondering whether to feel relieved or miserable. So it had all been an illusion, then. Why was there something so strangely melancholy about that thought? The pale Sally-Anne had never been real. But how could her face be so vivid in his mind?

"Thank you, Professor." Hermione exchanged a few polite phrases with McGonagall, then took Harry's arm and led him gently outside. As the office door closed behind them, Harry whispered: "Well, I guess that settles it, then."

"It certainly does." What was the strange light in Hermione's eyes? She dragged him around the corner, into a deserted corridor.

"She's lying! McGongall is lying! Now I know for certain that she existed, your apocryphal Hufflepuff."

"What? But we just saw the records..."

Hermione shook her head, impatiently. "Didn't you _see_ it? Did you see how her hands were shaking when you mentioned Sally-Anne? And then she _showed us the school records! _Professor McGongall, the keeper of the secret Hogwarts records, _showed_ the confidential Hogwarts books to two students, simply because one of them claims to remember a student who was never there. Why would she do such a thing? She could have shrugged the whole thing off. Or she could have worried about your false memory and sent you off to the hospital wing for some rest. But she did neither. Instead, she went out of her way to _prove_ to you that Sally-Anne only existed in your dreams... _Why_?"

"I don't know." Harry felt his head spinning. "Hermione, you can't be suggesting that McGonagall is trying to conceal some kind of crime? If Sally-Anne does not exist in the school records, and not in anyone's memory, except for mine, then perhaps she was never real..."

Hermione shook her head. "School records can be falsified, even magical ones. Minds can be wiped, memories modified..."

"But why wasn't _my _mind modified, if everyone else's was?"

Hermione looked at him. "Perhaps..." she said slowly, "perhaps your mind is different somehow, Harry." She caught sight of his face. "Oh, I don't mean that you are crazy. But we know that your mind _is _different in certain significant ways. You can speak to snakes, for example. Perhaps whatever makes you a Parselmouth also protects you from memory modification."

She stood silently for a moment, a faraway look on her face. "I wonder..." she said dreamily, "I wonder if someone would actually remember to modify _every single_ record of a person's existence. It would be hard to do, you know. You would remember the big things, like school records, and classmates' memories, but it would be easy to overlook _something_, something minor and insignificant."

She was lost in thought as they walked back to the Gryffindor common room. Ron looked up when they entered, but soon pretended to ignore them. Apparently, he was tired of the non-existent Hufflepuff. He headed upstairs with Seamus and Dean, and Harry and Hermione were left alone in the common room.

Hermione looked quickly around, then whispered to Harry: "I need some help with my homework."

Whatever Harry had expected her to say, that wasn't it. He simply stared at her.

_"What-?"_

"My homework, Harry." There was a little smile hovering around her mouth now. "I was wondering if you could call Dobby; he may be able to help with a particularly tricky part." She pulled out a piece of parchment and got a quill ready.

Baffled, Harry said into the empty air: "Hey, Dobby?"

And Dobby appeared with a crack, his huge gooseberry eyes watery with excitement. "Harry Potter called?"

"Hi, Dobby," Harry said gently. "Thank you for coming." He cut off Dobby's protestations of gratitude over Harry's great kindness in actually _thanking_ him. "My friend Hermione needs some help with her...er... homework."

"Dobby," said Hermione kindly. "I am working on a particularly tricky independent study project for arithmancy, and I was wondering if you would be able to help."

Dobby squealed excitedly. "Dobby would be happy to help, Miss. Dobby is knowing a great deal about arithmancy, both _gematria_ and runic numerology. All house-elves do."

"_Really_?" Hermione sounded surprised, but she hastened to add: "Dobby, I am studying a particularly obscure and little known branch of Muggle arithmancy known as _statistics._"

"Statistics?" Dobbby tasted the unfamiliar word thoughtfully. "Dobby is not knowing that word, Miss."

Hermione shook her wild hair out of her face and smiled at him. "Very few in the wizarding world have ever heard of this field, Dobby. But the principles are easy enough to understand: We gather numbers about all sorts of things, odd and arbitrary things, like the number of steps in a staircase, the height of children, the number of people falling ill from a particular disease. And then we study the _patterns _that emerge from these random numbers. And those patterns, Dobby, sometimes tell a story that individual numbers can't."

"Oh!" Dobby's eyes shone as he pondered the wondrous mysteries of statistics.

"So I was wondering, Dobby," Hermione said softly, "if you could help me gather some numbers?"

Dobby nodded eagerly, and she went on: "I would be particularly anxious, for example, to learn about the number of Hogwarts students who are served dinner in the Great Hall every night. I have noticed that there is precisely the right number of plates at each meal, never too many or too few. How can that be?"

"Enchantments, Miss," Dobby was delighted to share what he knew with Hermione. "The number of plates required always appears in the magic fire in the kitchen, along with vital information about special dietary requirements and so forth."

Hermione smiled gently at him. "Dobby? It would be so tremendously helpful to me if you could give me some numbers about the Hogwarts dinner service for an arbitrary time period. Say for example..." She glanced down at her parchment. "For example the month of September 1991. Could you tell me how many students ate dinner at Hogwarts each night in September that year?"

"Yes, of course, Miss!" Dobby nodded happily and disappeared with a little bang.

They waited in silence. It took Dobby less than half an hour to get back.

"Harry Potter and Miss Granger, Dobby's got _statistics!" _He held out his notes proudly and began to recite in a solemn voice: "Student dinners served at Hogwarts. September 1, 1991: 412. September 2: 412. September 3: 412. September 4: 412. September 5: 412. September 6: 412. September 7: 412. September 8: 411. September 9: 411..." He read out the numbers until the end of the month. After September 7, there had only been 411 students in the Great Hall for dinner every night.

"Thank you, Dobby," Hermione whispered. "That is exactly what I need..."

Dobby vanished with a smile and a puff, but Harry and Hermione stood frozen, looking silently at one another. _Sally-Anne Perks had been at Hogwarts for seven days, before vanishing into thin air. What had happened to her during those seven days?_


	2. Chapter 2

Harry tried desperately to remember more. He turned his fleeting recollection of Sally-Anne over and over in his mind until it began to wear thin, unravel at the edges. _Had _he really seen her? Hermione made him repeat the little he recalled, over and over again: The color of the girl's eyes, the shade of her fair hair, the expression on her thin little face. Had he seen Sally-Anne again during dinner, after the sorting? She must have been sitting at the Hufflepuff table; had he caught a glimpse of her pale face next to Susan's pink one?

No. He hadn't really paid attention to the Hufflepuffs. After the sorting, Harry had lost himself in the exhilaration of a new belonging; he had been swept up in the joyous new community at the Gryffindor table. How well he remembered the flame-haired Fred and George, Percy's air of affectation... He had studied, with secret delight, the faces of the other children who had been sorted into Gryffindor with him: Hermione, Ron, Dean, Seamus, Neville... They had laughed and talked and eaten, suddenly ravenous now that the sorting was over. Harry may have looked over at the Slytherin table once of twice, relieved that he had not ended up _there, _but he had never given much thought to Hufflepuff that night.

But what about _before_ the sorting? Had he seen her as they were waiting nervously outside the Great Hall? He remembered the throng of new students, huddled together, their voices sounding thin and eerie in the echoing stone chamber. Had Sally-Anne been among them? He could not recall.

She must have been on the platform at King's Cross station, waiting for the magnificent scarlet steam engine to depart. Harry imagined her standing on the platform in the mist. Had she come alone, like him, or had there been a family with her, a shadowy mother and father? Had she leaned out a window as the train rolled out of the station, hoping to catch a last glimpse of her disappearing mother? Her mother... Had someone wept for Sally-Anne when she left for Hogwarts? Did someone shed tears when she disappeared? Or had she simply vanished out of all remembrance?

Had Sally-Anne cried on the train, fearful of the unknown life ahead of her? Or had she found comfort in the company of other students like herself? Had she smiled shyly at a child that seemed pleasant, someone she would like to have for a friend? Had she bought candy from the trolley and marveled at the new, delightful magic?

He didn't know.

Harry was certain he hadn't noticed Sally-Anne on the platform or on the train. His mind had been occupied with the friendly red-haired boy who had turned out to be Ron and the preachy little girl with the untamed hair who had been Hermione. Harry had always been alone before he came to Hogwarts, and he had learned not to mind too much. But the magical scarlet train had granted a wish that he had never even uttered; it had brought him friends. He had marveled at Ron's company, delighted to find that Ron was still there by his side as they walked to the boats, and Hermione as well. He was walking _with_ somebody now, with his new friends. He had stepped into a boat with Ron...

The boats! _He had seen Sally-Anne in one of the boats! _Harry remembered now: He had looked around for Hermione as the boats began to glide toward the distant castle, a candlelit mirage in the moonlight, and he had caught a brief glimpse of a white face next to a good-looking dark-haired boy. Sally-Anne and Anthony Goldstein...

...

Harry and Hermione climbed the spiral staircase to the Ravenclaw common room together. They were met by a locked door at the top, a heavy oak door without a handle. There was no portrait asking for a password, just a bronze door knocker shaped like a bird. A raven, perhaps, or an eagle?

Hesitantly, Harry knocked the metal bird against the wood. To his amazement, the bird spoke to him: "Where do vanished objects go?"

"Oh," Hermione breathed softly by his side, "it doesn't ask for a password, but for the answer to a riddle. It's a measure of wisdom; only those with a mind worthy of Ravenclaw may enter."

The bird repeated its question, sweetly: "Where do vanished objects go?"

_That's precisely what we were wondering, _Harry thought to himself. He saw that Hermione was thinking furiously, but he did not wait for her answer. Instead, he addressed the bird:

"If we knew that, the objects wouldn't be _vanished_, would they? Then they would just be _moved_ somewhere - "

The bird was silent for a moment. Then the door swung open before them, as the bird fluted softly: "Not quite the answer I had expected, but you may enter."

The Ravenclaw common room was light and airy, with tall arched windows and tapestries in midnight blue and bronze. Their arrival was met with surprise, but they found that Anthony was very willing to talk them.

The three of them found a secluded window seat with a dizzying view of the lake and of mountains far off in the misty distance.

Anthony smiled at them, a sudden smile that illuminated his serious dark face. "So you found your way into Ravenclaw? I am not surprised; there is more than a little Ravenclaw in both of you. We are still hoping that the Sorting Hat will realize its mistake and re-sort Hermione..."

"Just visiting, Anthony," said Hermione softly, but she blushed a little at Anthony's compliment. "We have a question for you."

Harry watched the Ravenclaw boy's face closely. "Anthony, do you remember when we first arrived at Hogwarts, in the boats?"

"Of course I do. How could I possibly forget?" There was a distant expression in Anthony's eyes. "It was the best day of my life."

"Was someone with you in the boat, or were you alone?"

The shadow of a frown fell over Anthony's face. He was silent for a moment, then he said softly: "How odd that you should ask me that..."

Harry leaned closer. "What do you mean?"

Anthony shook his head slowly. "I'm not sure what I mean, exactly. It's hard to put into words. You know how we were two to a boat, right? But the number of students must have been uneven, because I was the only one in my boat. Except..."

"Except what?" Harry held his breath.

Anthony's dark eyes met his. "Promise you won't laugh. I know this sounds _ridiculous, _but... I remember that there was no one next to me in the boat; it was empty, except for me. _But I don't remember feeling alone..._ I should have felt it, shouldn't I? When I ended up being the odd man out, in a boat all by myself when everyone else had a companion, I should have felt some kind of loneliness. But there was no loneliness. I don't know how to explain this. My mind remembers being the only one in the boat, but my heart remembers a different emotion, a sense of companionship instead of solitude. When I remembered it later, I thought that maybe it was the magic that did it; maybe the magic of Hogwarts kept me company as I sailed towards it in the night..."

He looked curiously at them. "Why did you ask me about this?"

Harry didn't know what to say, but Hermione had an answer ready: "We are just trying to find out more about Hogwarts and how its magic works. There is still so many things to learn."

Apparently, the Ravenclaw boy found this to be a satisfactory explanation, for he nodded gravely. "You are right. Sometimes I wonder if Hogwarts holds more secrets than we could ever imagine."

...

Hermione twirled her quill. The other Gryffindors had gone to bed, so Harry and Hermione had been able to spread their collected evidence out on the floor. Hermione was staring intently at the various parchments in front of them, an assortment of "statistics" provided by the enthusiastic Dobby. Dobby had not even objected to a little surreptitious nightly visit to McGonagall's office, and pages from the school records were copied out in Dobby's tiny elfish handwriting. They had the names of all 411 students who had officially attended Hogwarts in the fall of 1991. They knew what houses all the students were in, what they had been served for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which classes they were enrolled in, and what grades they had received. Harry had been pleasantly surprised to find that Snape had not been that enchanted with Draco's performance in potions after all, but Hermione didn't even smile at that delightful piece of information.

Dobby was curled up on the floor next to them, breathlessly awaiting any further requests for help with this strange new _gematria. _

"It just doesn't make any sense," Hermione muttered. "How can someone fall out of existence without anyone noticing? She vanished, both from our recollections and from the magical records as well. Did she _die?_ Did she leave school altogether? That would explain why she is not in the records, perhaps, but not why we can't remember her at all. _Why _didn't we see that there was a student less? Didn't anyone notice such an unprecedented anomaly?"

"I don't know," Harry whispered.

"Dobby thinks it's not _unprecedented, _Miss." Harry and Hermione blinked at the little house-elf in surprise.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

Dobby searched in the folds of the striped kitchen towel he was wearing, his eyes shining. "Dobby is liking _statistics, _Harry Potter, Sir, so Dobby is wanting to collect more numbers for himself. Numbers from the kitchen, about the food, going back to the beginning."

"To the _beginning?_" Harry wondered when that had been - hadn't Hogwarts been founded back in the Middle Ages some time? And sure enough, the fat pile of papers Dobby pulled out from the depths of his towel, all covered in minuscule florid writing, looked like it included more than a thousand years' worth of meticulous meal records.

"Dobby can read this to you, Harry Potter, Sir - " the elf suggested hopefully, but Harry shook his head gently.

"How about you just give us the gist, Dobby? You know, the pattern behind the numbers."

Dobby looked a little disappointed, but nodded agreeably. "Well, Harry Potter and Miss Granger, Dobby is seeing a pattern in the numbers he is collecting. The number of dinners has always stayed the same through the school year, except when students get sick or are expelled, or if they die like poor Miss Myrtle. Then the numbers change, Sir, but there is always a note in the record that tells what happened."

"So there is always a note in the record if someone leaves school, or if they die?" Hermione's voice was shaking a little.

"Yes, Miss. Except for twice."

"_Twice?_"

Dobby nodded solemnly. "Yes, Miss. Once in September 1991, and once in September 1896."

Hermione's eyes were wide. "In September 1896? It has happened _before?_"

"Yes, Miss. In September 1896, the number of dinners is suddenly one less, without any note of explanation in the records." He consulted his papers. "On September 8, Miss. Seven days after the beginning of school."

_Seven days... _Harry felt a sudden chill, in spite of the fire crackling merrily in the Gryffindor common room.


	3. Chapter 3

[_**Author's note:**_ **Thank you for the reviews and comments! I love hearing your thoughts! No, I'm certainly not the first person to notice that Sally-Anne seems to have disappeared after the brief mention in _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone_. There are several other stories on this website that feature Sally-Anne - a search for the phrase "Sally-Anne Perks" will bring them up. The canon never mentions which house Sally-Anne was sorted into, but for the purposes of this story, she is a Hufflepuff. This story takes place during the fall and early winter of Harry's third year at Hogwarts. Sirius Black is still on the loose, Ron still has his rat Scabbers, and Hermione has a time-turner hidden away somewhere.]**

...

"Two disappearances..." said Hermione thoughtfully. "One in 1896, and one in 1991. Two Hogwarts students vanished, ninety-five years apart... Dobby, is there a way to tell which house the first student who disappeared was sorted into? And can you tell if it was a boy or a girl?"

Dobby scanned his precious numbers carefully. "Well, Miss, it seems that there was one less dinner served at the Hufflepuff table on September 8, 1896. Dobby is not knowing whether that Hufflepuff student was a boy or a girl, but Dobby _is _noticing that there were only four first year girls in Hufflepuff house that year and five in the others, Miss." He turned and gazed at Harry with enormous green eyes. "Dobby is not liking this very much, Harry Potter, Sir."

Harry patted the house elf gently on the arm. "I know, Dobby," he whispered. "I don't like it much either." _Another Hufflepuff girl missing?_

Hermione began to gather the piles of parchment together.

"There is someone we have to go and talk to right away," she declared, stuffing the last pieces of parchment into her school bag.

"Who?"

She squeezed the overfilled bag shut. "The only living person I know who was present at both sorting ceremonies. There is only one person at Hogwarts who was here both in 1896 and in 1991, apart from the ghosts."

It took Harry a minute, but then he realized who she meant. "Dumbledore? You really think he's _that_ old?"

"He was born in 1881. It's in _Hogwarts, a History_. Seriously, Harry, have you ever _opened_ that book."

"No."

Hermione sighed. "Well, it's a good thing I have, then. Dumbledore would have been fifteen years old during the first disappearance. He would have been a fifth year student in Gryffindor; I wouldn't be surprised if he was a prefect."

An absurd image of the white-haired Dumbledore in school robes, sporting a shining prefect's badge half-hidden by his beard appeared in Harry's mind, and he smiled to himself. Somehow, he couldn't imagine Dumbledore at fifteen.

...

Harry rather enjoyed walking through the labyrinthine corridors with Hermione. His memory of Sally-Anne was a brief glimpse of another reality, one that no longer existed in anyone's mind but his. Ron had refused to acknowledge that the other reality, the one in which Sally-Anne had belonged, had ever been. But Hermione had entered into the reality of his memory; she had become part of the quest for the lost girl from the past.

They paused by the gargoyle that guarded Dumbledore's office. "Sherbet lemon?" suggested Harry hopefully, but the gargoyle gave him a stony look of disdain and remained in place. Apparently, last year's password had been replaced by a newer one.

Hermione sighed. "What do you think Professor Dumbledore's favorite sweet is this year, Harry? Gobstoppers? Pear drops? Petit fours? Red currant jelly?"

Harry thought about it. _Mint_. He had smelled mint on the headmaster's breath last time they passed each other in the hallway. But what kind of mint? Somehow, he didn't think Dumbledore would be partial to Tic Tacs. What was that old-fashioned minty sweet the crazy old Mrs. Figg had given him sometimes when the Dursleys had forced her to watch Harry for them? She had all kinds of odd, delightful confections hidden away in her drawers, and Harry had always enjoyed them immensely, unlike her distinctly unpleasant homemade cabbage soup. Some of the sweets had such peculiar names: Edinburgh castle rock, flying saucers, humbug... Yes, that was the one!

"_Humbug_."

The gargoyle swung aside to let them in. "_Humbug_? Is that an actual sweet?" asked Hermione as they stepped into Dumbledore's office. "I've never heard of it."

But before Harry had a chance to teach the dentists' daughter about the joys of old Muggle sweets, they both noticed the same thing: Dumbledore's office was empty. But the Sorting Hat was sitting, ancient and ragged, on his bookshelf.

They glanced quickly around. The large circular room was filled with old books that smelled pleasantly of dust and leather, and with all sorts of strange, delicate silver instruments, clocks, and measuring devices. Fawkes the Phoenix was in his golden cage, a magnificent burst of scarlet and gold feathers, but there was no one else about.

The Sorting Hat appeared to be sleeping on its shelf, leaning against a stack of books which included titles like _The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz _and _Down with Skool! A Guide to School Life for Tiny Pupils and their Parents_ by someone named Molesworth. Harry lifted the old tattered hat gently off the shelf and placed it on his head. For a moment, he held his breath, and then he felt the hat stir slowly to life.

"What's this?" The hat sounded drowsy and a tad testy. "Come to get re-sorted, have you? Have you had a change of heart, Mr. Potter?"

"Er... No, thanks. I'm very happy in Gryffindor. I've just come to ask you a few questions, if you wouldn't mind."

The hat sighed, and little puffs of dust rose from the frayed ancient fabric as it did so. "But I _do_ mind. I'm the Sorting Hat, not a bloody school counselor. I put you in Gryffindor as you requested. I am _not_ going to analyze the choice you made back then and speculate about how you would have done in Slytherin. I'm going back to sleep."

The hat tried to wriggle off his head, but Harry held on to it firmly with both hands. "I don't want to ask you about my sorting. I want to ask you something else."

"Ouch." The hat squirmed, but finally gave up. "All right, I will answer _one _question, but then you'd better let me go, or I'll sort you into Slytherin."

"Three. Please answer three questions, and I will let you go."

"Pushy, aren't you? Are you _sure_ you are not a Slytherin? All right, you little rogue. I will answer three questions, but if you and your friend _dare_ to disturb my nap after that, I will sort you both into Durmstrang. "

Harry tried to squint up at the hat on top of his head to see if it was serious, but of course this was impossible. "I don't think you can _do_ that."

"Was that a question?"

"No. Absolutely not." Harry thought quickly. "All right, here is my first question: _What happened to Sally-Anne Perks_?"

"Oho!" A little chuckle sounded from the hat. "Now, _there's_ a name I did not expect to hear..."

"Sally-Anne disappeared shortly after the sorting," said Hermione quietly.

"Did she now?" The sorting hat was silent for a moment. Then it said: "I have wondered myself what happened to Sally-Anne Perks. I could sense that she was no longer at Hogwarts; I can always tell when someone I have sorted leaves the castle. She was only here for seven days. But no one seems to remember that; her name is no longer spoken. But I'm afraid I don't know the answer to your question. She was here, she was sorted into Hufflepuff, and then she vanished. That is all I know. Second question, please."

"Harry, think carefully - " began Hermione, but Harry already knew what he wanted to ask:

"What was she like? You must have seen into her character when you sorted her. What was Sally-Anne like?"

"Hm." The Sorting Hat considered for a moment. "Well, she was without doubt a Hufflepuff. She had some magic, but she was neither clever, nor brave, nor cruel. There was no question about where to put her. But - "

"But what?" Harry hastened to add: "Er... That was a prompt, not a question."

"All right." He could have sworn the Sorting Hat was laughing at him. "You still have one question left, Mr. Potter. Now, about Sally-Anne..."

The deep sonorous voice from above was grave as it answered: "Sally-Anne was a Hufflepuff. That much was clear. But there was something about her that made me uneasy. I'm not sure how to explain it."

"Please try."

The hat sighed. "Mr. Potter, you have a wand, of course. Remind me of the type of wand you have, please?"

"Holly and phoenix feather, eleven inches."

"What if you made a mistake one day and picked up what you believed to be your wand, and found yourself holding a _different_ holly and phoenix feather wand, of the same length?"

Harry thought about it. "I think would realize it was not mine. It just wouldn't feel right."

"Exactly. A wizard knows his wand, and he would know if it was a different one, even if it looked identical. Well, I know _children_. I have sorted children for several hundred years, sorted them into each of the four houses of Hogwarts. _But Sally Anne-Perks was different. _She was like no child I have ever sorted. Oh, I don't mean that she was some evil villain in disguise, or anything like that. Remember: I can always read a person's true character, and I can tell you that Sally-Anne was a sweet, but not terribly bright little girl. She was frightened at the sorting, and she felt very confused. But all of that was normal; I have seen fear and confusion in hundreds of children over the years. There was no evil, no malevolence in Sally-Anne Perks, of that I am certain. She was simply a little girl who felt scared. But there was _something _about her, something I can't quite grasp. Something about her felt off_._ Something about her was _wrong_. I don't know any other way to put it."

"Oh." Harry thought for a moment, then said: "Hermione, why don't you ask the last question?"

And Hermione stepped closer and addressed the hat without a moment's hesitation: "Please name all the girls that you sorted into Hufflepuff House in September 1896. _All_ of them, please."

The Sorting Hat obligingly rattled off: "Abbott, Dorothea. Doge, Hazel. Sprout, Demeter. Zeller, Amaryllis ."

And then the hat fell silent.

"_All_ of them, please," said Hermione softly. Harry held his breath and waited. Was there another name? There _had_ to be another name...

The Sorting Hat sighed heavily. "I - I'm afraid I can't. There is another name that I wish to speak, but I find myself unable to do so. Every time I try to utter the last name, my tongue grows numb and my memory becomes blank. An enchantment is upon me, and it forbids me to utter one of the names from that year's sorting. I'm afraid that this is all I am able to tell you, young Gryffindors."

Harry pulled the hat off his head, thanked it politely, and put it gently back on the shelf. The hat draped itself gratefully over the stack of books and appeared to fall asleep.

"Ah, Harry! Trying to sort yourself out, are you?" Dumbledore spoke gently from the doorway.

Harry spun around. "Professor Dumbledore! I'm so sorry - we did not mean to intrude."

"Any time, Harry. And you too, of course, Miss Granger. Anyone who can guess my password is welcome to enter. I am careful to choose my passwords, you know. No ministry official has ever cracked my password, but children do it all the time." Dumbledore smiled and waved them in the direction of a couple of plump armchairs.

He sat down at his desk and looked at them over the top of his half-moon spectacles. "What can I do for the two of you? Or did you merely come to discuss your house placement with the Sorting Hat?"

Harry looked at the sleeping hat. "I don't think it likes to analyze house placement after the fact, Sir."

Dumbledore's blue eyes twinkled. "Indeed it does not, but that has never stopped students from consulting it. I used to catch young Sirius Black in here all the time. Apparently, he was worried at times that the Sorting Hat had made a dreadful mistake in sorting him into Gryffindor instead of Slytherin, where the rest of his family had been."

A gruff voice sounded from the shelf: "I don't make mistakes. He was a Gryffindor, if I ever saw one."

"Sirius Black, the escaped murderer? The one who broke out of Azkaban?" Hermione whispered. "He was sorted into _Gryffindor_?"

"Indeed he was," said Dumbledore softly. "Along with Harry's father and mother, and your Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lupin."

Harry recalled the gaunt, haunted face he had seen in the wanted posters. Sirius Black, a Gryffindor?

"How can that be, Professor Dumbledore?" he asked quietly.

Dumbledore shook his head slowly. "I'm not sure, Harry. Sometimes I think that there must be some mistake, that Sirius must have been framed in some way... But you did not come here to discuss Sirius Black, did you, Harry?"

"No, Sir." Harry hesitated a little. Then he looked Dumbledore straight in the eye. "We came here to discuss Sally-Anne Perks, Professor."

Dumbledore sat frozen for a moment. All the color had suddenly drained from his face, and his blue eyes were widened in shock.

"Professor?" Hermione put a hand on his arm, and he pulled himself together.

"Ah. Yes." Dumbledore smiled at them, but it seemed to cost him a great deal of effort. "Sally-Anne Perks... Now, may I ask how you came up with that name?"

"She was sorted right before me, Professor," said Harry. "She was sorted into Hufflepuff shortly before I was sorted into Gryffindor."

Was it his imagination, or did Dumbledore's voice tremble a little as he asked: "And how do you know that, Harry?"

"I know it because I was _there, _Professor. Just like you. I remember her being sorted into Hufflepuff."

"You _remember_ her?" Dumbledore whispered. Why was there a note of disbelief in his voice? The headmaster turned to Hermione. "What about you, Miss Granger? Do you remember her as well?"

"No, Sir."

"Well, then, it seems that you must be mistaken, Harry."

Harry could not believe his own ears. "I am not mistaken, Professor, and you know it. Sally-Anne Perks was here for seven days before she disappeared, just like the other girl."

"The other girl? What other girl?"

Harry could feel his temper rising. "The girl who was sorted into Hufflepuff in 1896, when you were in your fifth year. The other girl who disappeared from Hogwarts after seven days."

Dumbledore's face was ashen. "Harry, how do you - ? No, impossible, you _can't_ know..."

Harry leaned forward. "Please tell me what happened to them, Professor! What happened to Sally-Anne and to the other girl?"

Dumbledore sighed heavily and shook his head. "Please... Harry, Hermione - I do not understand how you came by this information, but I must beg you to _leave it alone._ Please do not ask about Sally-Anne Perks. Or about... the other girl. _Please. _I must ask you both to trust my judgment in this matter. _Some things are best forgotten_. "

_Some things are best forgotten_? The image of Sally-Anne's pale face rose in Harry's recollection. If he were to forget her too, she would vanish completely, as if she never had existed...

"No, Professor. She does not deserve to be forgotten."

Dumbledore sighed. "Oh, Harry," he said softly. "You are a true Gryffindor, aren't you? Always striving to rescue an innocent victim. But this is different, Harry. Sally-Anne was not the innocent victim of a crime; she wasn't murdered or snatched away by Lord Voldemort. Please trust me, Harry. I cannot and will not tell you more than this, but believe me when I say that _Sally-Anne vanished from Hogwarts because she should not have been here in the first place. _Her presence here was all wrong_."_

Hermione opened her mouth to speak, but Dumbledore stopped her gently: "No, Miss Granger, no further questions. I have said all I have to say, and I beg you both to pursue this no further. I wish you both a pleasant afternoon."

And he showed them, politely but firmly, to the door.


	4. Chapter 4

_[**Author's Note: **Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I do agree that the budding romance in this story was a little sudden; I've gone back and toned it down a bit. **Ainnenoi Aurum** ~ you are right, this story does not show up if you search for "Sally-Anne Perks" on this website. Given the subject matter of this story, that **is** a little creepy... ]_

_..._

Once outside the headmaster's door, Hermione turned to Harry, her brown eyes wide. "What was _that -_? Dumbledore _knows _what happened to Sally-Anne and the other girl, but for some reason he can't tell us anything. I wonder why... Harry, you don't think that Dumbledore himself was somehow involved in these disappearances, do you?"

"Dumbledore-?" Harry shivered. Surely not? Dumbledore was such an amiable old man... Wasn't he? All at once, Harry was filled with an alarming sense that the familiar Hogwarts had become distorted, transformed from a warm and friendly place into a sinister and unknown world. _What was happening? _A little girl had vanished into nothingness, and instead of setting heaven and earth in motion to get to the bottom of the mystery, the kind and brilliant headmaster had been unnerved at the mere mention of her name. There could be no doubt that Dumbledore was hiding something, but _what_ was he hiding? Harry could not imagine the benign old headmaster as a villain or a murderer, either at fifteen or a hundred and ten. Or could he? He shook his head and whispered: "I don't know... He knows _something_, that's for certain. How odd to see him that shaken up..."

The recollection of the headmaster's expression disturbed him. How old Dumbledore had seemed, how frail and lifeless when robbed of his usual good-humored composure...

A sudden thought struck Harry: "But I don't understand. _Why _was he so taken aback? Wouldn't McGonagall have warned him that we have begun to ask about Sally-Anne? I have a sense that they both know of a terrible secret that they refuse to talk about. But if they were in this together, trying to cover up something from the past, wouldn't she have warned him so he could be prepared for our questions?"

Hermione nodded. "You are right, Harry. That _is _strange. And to imagine that Dumbledore was so affected by our questions, whether or not he knew that we might be coming! He seemed to fall apart at the very mention of Sally-Anne. In fact, it seemed that he was even more disturbed by the mention of her name that McGonagall was. But if Dumbledore himself was somehow involved in her disappearance, if _he_ had planned it, one would think that a man of his intellect would have had his answers ready in case someone discovered a hint of the truth. Instead, he acted as if he had tried to _forget_ that these two girls had ever existed..."

She frowned. "Something else was bothering me as well, Harry. The Sorting Hat had been bewitched so it could no longer remember the first girl's name."

"Yes," said Harry thoughtfully. "That would take some very powerful magic. I don't think an ordinary wizard could have bewitched the Sorting Hat, do you? It must have been someone very powerful, someone like Dumbledore... or Voldemort..."

Hermione shuddered at the mention of Voldemort's name, but for once, she let it go. "You are right, Harry. Confounding the Sorting Hat would require very advanced magic, but that's not what I meant. What I don't understand is _how the Sorting Hat could remember Sally-Anne's name._ Why did it remember her name, and not the name of the girl who disappeared ninety-five years ago? If the same person tried to cover up both disappearances, why make the hat forget one name and not the other? Why would someone confound it once, but not twice?"

Harry thought about it. "But why confound the hat at all? If the two students had been deleted from everyone's memories, as well as from the school records, why bother to confound the Sorting Hat? Nobody was expected to remember. It seems to be some sort of freak accident that I can remember Sally-Anne. If my mind didn't have that strange quirk, no one would ever have asked the hat about Sally-Anne."

"Perhaps they just wanted to be extra careful?" Hermione suggested tentatively, but added: "But why not make it forget Sally-Anne as well, then? Oh, this doesn't make any sense! Unless..."

"Unless what?"

Hermione stood still for a moment, twirling a strand of her hair into an impossibly tangled knot as she was thinking. Finally she said: "Unless there was another reason to confound the Sorting Hat. If no one was expected to ask questions about the girl who disappeared in 1896, perhaps her name was removed from the hat's memory for another reason."

"What? What kind of reason?"

"Perhaps the first name had to be removed before the Sorting Hat could sort Sally-Anne."

Harry looked at her, perplexed. "By why would the Sorting Hat need the first name removed - ? Oh..." A strange comprehension began to dawn in his mind. _No, impossible! And yet..._

He met Hermione's glance, and she nodded. "The Sorting Hat would not be able to sort Sally-Anne _if it remembered that it had sorted her already_, ninety-five years previously. Perhaps one of the two names had to be removed, _because they were the same_."

...

As they were walking back to Gryffindor Tower, they ran into Professor McGonagall. Harry felt his heart beating in his chest. Should he ask her the question that was hovering in his mind? McGonagall greeted them warmly and was about to walk on when Harry burst out: "Professor McGonagall, why didn't you warn Professor Dumbledore that we were trying to find out more about Sally-Anne Perks? When we mentioned her name, he looked as if he had seen a ghost."

"_Harry!_" He could tell by Hermione's exasperated little sigh that she found his question rash and tactless, but he didn't care.

Harry half expected Professor McGonagall to give him an icy stare and a lecture on minding his own affairs, but instead she have them both a thoughtful look. "Did he now - ?" she said softly. She gave them a little smile as she scrutinized them over the top of her glasses. Was there a twinkle in her eye as she looked at them? It was difficult to tell in the dim torchlit corridor. "Mr. Potter and Miss Granger, when you asked me about a student by the name of Sally-Anne Perks, I told you that no student by that name had attended Hogwarts. _I told you the truth. _Indeed, I would never dream of lying to a student, or to anyone else for that matter. In telling you the truth and in showing you the school ledgers that demonstrate that there is no record of a Miss Perks attending Hogwarts, I have fulfilled whatever duties have been placed upon me. Alerting the headmaster that two intelligent students _may_ not be satisfied with my answer would be going beyond the call of duty. The headmaster is a busy man, and it would be absurd to expect me to report each and every conversation I have with the students to Professor Dumbledore. _There never was a Sally-Anne Perks._ There, I have told you the truth. If you choose to spend your free time having conversations with the headmaster, the Sorting Hat, the portraits on the wall, or the Hogwarts ghosts for that matter, I fail to see that I have a duty to stop you from doing so. As long as it doesn't interfere with your school work, of course."

Her intense glance dwelt on Hermione for a moment. It seemed to Harry that she changed topics rather abruptly, for she said to Hermione: "You have taken on a rather heavy course load this year, Miss Granger. I hope it is not wearing you out."

Hermione shook her head. "Oh, no, Professor, I have been delighted to find that I suddenly have time in my schedule for everything I want to learn..." She smiled slightly, and McGonagall smiled back. Harry had an odd feeling he was missing something.

"Very good, Miss Granger. I am glad to hear that you are taking your studies so seriously. Very few students these days take an interest in the more challenging and arcane branches of magic. It would be a shame if part of our ancestors' vast knowledge were to fall into oblivion simply because students don't want to work that hard any more. _Some things should not be forgotten..._" She went on rapidly: "I am referring of course to some of the more advanced topics of arithmancy, such as isopsephia and theomatics. Very well, then. Off you go."

She nodded to them and turned to leave, but added over her shoulder: "I have no doubt, Miss Granger, that the _time management techniques_ you are employing this semester will serve you well in whatever other endeavors you choose to undertake as well. Just remember _not to go further than I suggested._"

Harry stared after her, bewildered, as she disappeared down the corridor. "What-?"

Hermione was fumbling with the top button on her shirt. She appeared to have some kind of jewelry around her neck, hidden under her clothes. Harry had vaguely noticed a gold chain against her neck, but hadn't given it much thought. Now he saw that the pendant she pulled out was a rather unusual one, a delicate little golden instrument made of complex interlocking circles.

"What's that?"

Hermione smiled. "It's a time turner, Harry. It allows the wearer to travel back in time. McGonagall gave it to me at the beginning of the term because she knew I wanted to take several classes that meet at the same time. I had to promise to keep it a secret. Very few people know that time turners even exist, you see. You can imagine the chaos that would ensue if people began to travel back in time and change events that had already occurred. And what if a time turner were to fall into the wrong hands? McGonagall has had this one since she was a little girl. She trusted me; she knew that I would just use it to travel back a few hours at a time to make room for more school work, just like she used to do."

"_You can travel back in time?" _Harry stared, mesmerized, at the golden instrument. "But - but if such a thing exists, why not use it to travel back in time and change _everything_? Why not stop _Voldemort? _Why not bring back the people he murdered?"

"Oh, Harry." There was tenderness in Hermione's brown eyes as she looked at him and shook her head, slowly. "It can't be used to travel back that far. That would be too dangerous; time itself would begin to unravel. It's only safe to travel back a few hours at a time, that's all. Anything more, and you would lose your mind."

"I see." Harry swallowed. For a moment, he had almost imagined that there _was_ a way, after all, to bring his parents back.

"And I'm afraid we can't travel back in time to the day we were sorted, either." said Hermione softly. "We can't travel back and see the sorting of Sally-Anne. But perhaps we can use the time-turner in some other way."

"What other way?"

"I don't know yet; I have to think about it. I have only used it to travel back in time myself, but there may be a way to use it _differently. _I wonder if it's possible to link it to the magical school records, somehow, and see what they looked like at an earlier date."

They had arrived at the entrance to the Gryffindor common room by now, and Hermione slipped the golden time-turner back under her shirt. As they entered the common room, they found that Ron was waiting for them, his normally pleasant freckled face flushed with anger.

"Finally made it back, did you?" His voice was uneven. "Funny, isn't it Harry, how you can remember some girl that never existed, but not Quidditch practice with your best friend."

Oh. Harry remembered now; he _had _promised Ron a practice session this afternoon. "I'm so sorry, Ron!"

"Forget it." Ron turned away from him.

"But Ron, it's not his fault - we had to see Dumbledore." Hermione was trying to help.

"Dumbledore? What for?"

Harry thought it best not to mention to Ron that they had gone to ask the headmaster about Sally-Anne. Instead, he said: "I had some questions about the Sorting Hat and how it works."

"Oh." Ron considered this for a moment. Then, to Harry's relief, he grinned. "Still wondering why it didn't put you in Slytherin, huh? And I guess Hermione is still wondering why she didn't end up in Ravenclaw."

"Yeah." Harry grabbed Ron's arm. "Come on, there is still a bit of daylight left. We can get a few minutes of practice in."

And to his relief, Ron agreed readily, and they went off together. Hermione remained behind in the common room. Harry saw that she was toying with the golden chain around her neck, and he knew that she would find a way to squeeze many hours of detective work into the remaining half hour before dinner.

...

Harry did not get a chance to speak to Hermione alone again that evening. But she must have been very busy indeed, for when Harry went to bed that night, he found a scroll of parchment under his pillow, no doubt delivered by the helpful Dobby. It was a report from Hermione.

As Harry glanced over it, he marveled at how much she had accomplished since they had last spoken to each other. She had not yet found a way to create a magical connection between the time turner and the school records, but she was working on it. She had, with Dobby's help, double-checked the school records and the meal records. There were no indications that any other students had suddenly disappeared from Hogwarts besides the two Hufflepuff girls. She had also looked carefully through the records for anyone else named Perks, in addition to Sally-Anne. "As you know," she wrote, "magical abilities often run in families, so Hogwarts students often have siblings or parents who also went to Hogwarts. But in Sally-Anne's case, I can find nothing. No one else by the name of Perks ever attended Hogwarts. Perhaps this means that she was the only person in her family who was a wizard, or perhaps she was a half-blood. Since we don't know her mother's maiden name, we wouldn't know if her mother ever went to Hogwarts. It could even be that Sally-Anne was adopted, and that Perks is the name of her adopted parents. But if Sally-Anne was Muggle-born, we should be able to find a record of her existence _outside _school_. _I have sent an owl to my parents; I know they are going up to London this weekend to see a play, and I asked them to stop by Somerset House to look something up for me. I told them it was for a school project, so I'm sure they'll want to help. If Sally-Anne Perks was sorted into Hufflepuff at age eleven, she must have been born around 1980. Perhaps my parents can find a record of her birth in the Muggle archives. Just in case, I also asked my parents to look for a record of someone with the same name born around 1885."

Harry smiled. Hermione had always been efficient, but Hermione equipped with a time-turner was astounding.

That night, he dreamed of Sally-Anne. In his dream, he was in Somerset House, finding his way to its hidden archives by descending a winding golden staircase that twisted and twirled like the time-turner. He found a deserted section of the archive that contained shelves of ancient books, all covered with a fine layer of dust. He pulled a volume off the shelf and opened it, and Sally-Anne rose from its pages, pale and ghostly. She looked at him for an instant, a strange, pleading look in her blue eyes, before she dissolved in the light.


	5. Chapter 5

"I am very, very sorry, Mr. Potter," Professor McGonagall said gently. "Much as I would like to, I cannot allow you to join your friends in Hogsmeade without a signed permission slip. No, please don't argue with me; my decision is final."

Oh, well. Harry hadn't really expected her to relent, but he was disappointed nevertheless. He turned away quickly so McGonagall wouldn't see how crestfallen he was.

But her voice called him back. "Mr. Potter? I understand that it must be difficult for you to be stuck here at the castle all day with only the ghosts and the portraits for company, but I dare say you could find some way to spend your time productively if you give it some thought." She gave him a quick smile before walking on to supervise the throngs of students who were getting ready for their first trip to the magical village.

_The ghosts and the portraits..._

All at once, Harry felt a little flutter of excitement as he waved to his departing friends. _Yes, this was the perfect time to find out what the ghosts and the portraits remembered. _Perhaps he didn't really regret missing the visit to Hogsmeade after all. Maybe there was more to discover here at Hogwarts, in the company of ghosts.

As soon as everyone was out of sight, he began to walk the ancient corridors in search of ghosts. The first one he found was the Fat Friar, a plump shimmering form hovering near the entrance to the Hufflepuff common room.

The Friar flittered politely aside to allow him to enter, but Harry paused beside him and said: "Excuse me, could I talk to you for a bit?"

"To me?" An expression of surprise could be seen on the Friar's indistinct features. "You want to talk to me?"

Harry nodded. "Yes, please, if you don't mind."

"Oh, I don't mind, my dear child. I'd be delighted to talk with you. I was just taken aback, since so few people ever stop to talk to a ghost."

Harry could make out the outline of an evanescent smile on the Friar's grey-white face. How insubstantial he was, how strangely fleeting, like a dream... Or like his own brief recollection of Sally-Anne...

"Could you tell me what a ghost is?" he whispered.

"Hm." The translucent face grew pensive. "Why do you wish to know about ghosts, I wonder?"

"I - I just do. What _is _a ghost? Is a ghost still a person?"

The Friar shook his head. "No, not exactly. A ghost is a memory, a lingering recollection. I still remain in these halls as a ghost because my soul has moved on, but my heart refuses to let go. My remembrances tie me to this place, and will do so forever more."

Harry stared at the spectral form of the Friar. "But you are a _Friar, _aren't you? A man of religion? Why would you want to linger here, rather than move on to some kind of afterlife?"

The Friar sighed softly. "I was a man of religion, yes, but still a man. When I was a student here, many centuries ago, I fell in love with a girl who used to walk these very halls that I am now haunting. Long ago, before Beauxbatons was built, young French witches and wizards used to come to Hogwarts to learn about magic. And among the French students was a girl called Perenelle. She was the most bewitching creature I have ever seen. Sometimes I still imagine that I see her in the hallways, her red hair glowing in the torchlight. But she loved another, a French boy called Nicolas Flamel."

"Oh. You loved _Perenelle Flamel_?"

"I did, and I still do..." whispered the Friar. "The day she married Nicolas was the day I became a Friar. I found a great deal of comfort in religion, and I spent the remainder of my days in prayer and in service of the poor. But there was no forgetting Perenelle, and after I died I found myself hovering here where she had once been. For I still remember her luminous green eyes, and that memory, God help me, is sweeter to me still than the promise of eternity."

Impulsively, Harry reached out to comfort the Friar, but there was no arm to touch, merely a elusive whisp of chill.

"What about you, child?" asked the Friar softly. "Is there a particular memory that haunts you?"

"Perhaps. But I don't know if she is a ghost or a living person, the girl I remember... Tell me, do you recall a girl who was sorted into your house two years ago? Her name was Sally-Anne Perks, and she seems to have disappeared."

He held his breath as he gazed at the friar's insubstantial form. He half expected the ghost to tell him that he had imagined things, but to his relief the Friar nodded.

"Of course I remember Sally-Anne. The pale little girl who used to walk around with Susan Bones before she left."

Harry felt his heart flutter. "Do you remember when she left and why?"

The Friar considered for a moment. "I do remember _when_, but I don't think I ever knew _why. _She was only here for a week or so, wasn't she? I don't know why she left, but I thought that she had gone home. She seemed quite melancholy, I do remember that. Even Susan, who is always so good-humored, couldn't cheer her up. Perhaps she was homesick. I remember seeing Sally-Anne walking the corridors at night a few times; I'm not sure where she went. I assumed at the time that she felt particularly homesick at night and was going to speak to one of the teachers, like Professor Sprout or the headmaster. I remember asking the other ghosts about her after it became clear that she had left, but none of them had heard anything about _why_ she left. "

"Did you notice anything at all unusual about her? Was she just an ordinary child? Or was she a ghost of some kind?"

"A ghost?" There was a faint expression of surprise on the Friar's spectral features. "No, she was certainly not a ghost. But now that you mention it, I don't think she was an ordinary child either. There was something about her..."

"Please help me," Harry whispered. "She has vanished, you see, and no one remembers her any more, except for me. There is no trace of her in the school records, and the teachers say she never existed. _But I remember her.._. I need to find out what happened to her. "

The Friar was silent for a moment. Then he said softly: "I do not know who or what she was. But I will do all I can to help you, Mr. Potter. I am touched by your concern for someone who is a mere memory, someone like me..."

"But she was not a ghost when she was here? No, she can't have been; she looked like an ordinary girl. But you think she wasn't really a girl either?"

The Friar shook his head, perplexed. "She _was_ a little girl and not a ghost or specter, of that I am certain. But something about her set her apart from the other children. I thought at the time that it was her sadness. There was something about her that was empty, something not fully present."

"Are you sure - " Harry swallowed. "Are you sure that she was human? Could she have been some other kind of being who had magically taken on a human form?"

"No, I don't think so." The Friar's phantom face was pensive. "No, she was human. She _felt_ human, and I do not think the Sorting Hat would have sorted anyone who wasn't a human wizard. But something about her was... too fleeting, as if she had already begun to disappear... And now I begin to recollect something else about her, something that nagged me at the time: She was familiar to me. She reminded me of someone I have seen in the past, but I cannot recall who."

"Another Hogwarts student? One from a hundred years ago?"

"Perhaps." The Friar shook his head slowly. "I have been haunting these halls for six hundred years. I have seen thousands of students come and go. A few I remember vividly, and you will no doubt be among them. But most of them have become distant recollections by now, too hazy to differentiate. Yes, I have seen someone at some point who looked very much like Sally-Anne, some distant ancestor of hers, perhaps. It happens, you know, when you linger for so long: People begin to blur. I sometimes laugh at the Weasley twins and their wild escapades, but when I think about their pranks, I find myself not quite recalling which ones were theirs, and which ones were perpetrated by their uncles, Fabian and Gideon."

He sighed. "But there are, as you know, a good many ghosts about this castle. Between us, we may be able to remember Sally-Anne more clearly. It happens rarely that we get involved in the affairs of the living, but perhaps it is warranted now. For even if Sally-Anne is not one of us, her disappearance has made her a kindred spirit. I will call together the ghosts of this castle, and we will convene a Ghost Council. Meet us at the top of the astronomy tower at midnight."

Harry nodded, grateful that he was no longer alone in remembering Sally-Anne. Somehow, she was made more substantial now that he knew that others recalled her as well, even if the others were an ancient hat and a ghost.

He wondered why no one had attempted to modify the memory of the Friar. Perhaps ghosts' memories could not be altered, because the ghosts themselves _were_ memories?

But what, then, of the portraits? There were hundreds of portraits on the Hogwarts walls, paintings that could move and speak and observe. Could a portrait remember? They must, he decided, for the Fat Lady remembered the passwords to Gryffindor Tower, didn't she?

But a portrait was something different from a ghost; a ghost was the memory of someone who had once lived. But a portrait -

As he walked toward Gryffindor Tower, he wondered why he had never paused to think, all the times he had walked by the portrait of the Fat Lady, who she _was. _There were talking portraits in the headmaster's office as well, but they were portraits of actual people, headmasters of Hogwarts from long ago. The portraits seemed to remember the people they represented; they recalled their lives as headmasters. But they were not the actual headmasters, of course, merely imprints that captured who they used to be.

He stopped at the portrait of the Fat Lady and looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. Her rotund face and grey curls were so familiar by now, but now he noticed that her faded pink dress was curiously old-fashioned. Was she the portrait of someone who had once lived, or was she the figment of some unknown painter's dreadful imagination?

"Password? she asked testily. "Why are you standing there gaping at me? You remembered it this morning, for heaven's sake!"

"Oh, I don't need to get in," said Harry hastily. "I was just wondering if I could ask you a few questions."

"Me?" She eyed him suspiciously. "Whatever for?"

"I - I was just curious about you. I mean, I see you every day, but I have no idea who you are. Are you the portrait of a person who once lived? How did your portrait come to hang here, at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower? Were you once in Gryffindor yourself?"

"Well, well, well." The portrait chuckled softly. "You know, Mr. Potter, you are the first person who has ever asked me that, in the thousand years I have been here."

"_Thousand?_ But then you must have been here since the beginning - ?"

"Indeed I have, Mr. Potter. You would never have guessed my true age, would you? I must admit that my frame has been replaced; my original one was terribly plain, and I wanted one of these pretty modern ones that some of the other portraits have..."

Harry looked doubtfully at her gilded baroque frame, but she must have mistaken his look for one of admiration, for she twittered: "Yes, it's lovely, isn't it?"

Harry smiled a little. "Did one of the founders put your portrait here, then? Back when the castle was first built?"

The Fat Lady cast him a conspiratorial glance and lowered her voice. "Oh, yes indeed. I have always preferred to remain anonymous to the students; one does not like to brag about one's family connections. But you seem to be an uncommonly sensitive and intelligent young man, so I don't mind confiding in you who I really am."

She glanced around, as if to assure herself that no one else was within earshot. "_I am his mother!_"

"His mother? Whose mother?" Harry was confused.

The portrait sighed a little, obviously realizing that she had overestimated his intelligence. "Godric Gryffindor's mother, of course! When he had the tower built, he wisely decided to make sure that outsiders could not enter the space reserved for the students of his house. He protected the entrance by a password, but instead of bewitching the door to open when the password was spoken, that dear boy decided to adorn the entrance with a portrait of his beloved mother. He even brought her here to see the portrait after it was installed, and she was delighted beyond words."

The Fat Lady paused. Then she went on: "Obviously, that was a long time ago, and Mrs. Gryffindor is long gone. But it's wonderful to think, isn't it, that as long as I am here, she will still be remembered, even if her name is not..."

Harry looked at her curiously. "Are you her soul, then?"

The portrait laughed. "Her soul? Oh, bless you dear boy, of course I am not! The soul of the good Mrs. Gryffindor has long since passed on to whatever mysteries lie beyond the grave. I am merely her impression, her memory if you will, captured by a mediocre painter one day a thousand years ago."

"But you are moving and speaking and remembering... In the Muggle world, the paintings can't do any of those things."

The Fat Lady shook her head. "Is that so? I suppose the Muggle painters can't be very good, then."

"I suppose not. Mrs. Gryffindor, may I ask you about something that happened in the past?"

"Yes, of course, my dear. I suppose you want to ask me about that rascal Slytherin?" She sighed. "Godric was such a dear, dear boy, but _far_ too trusting..."

Harry smiled. "No, that wasn't what I wanted to ask... There have been two students who disappeared from Hogwarts, two girls who vanished without a trace. No one remembers them, except the ghosts and the Sorting Hat. They both disappeared a week after being sorted into Hufflepuff House, one of them two years ago, and the other ninety-five years before that. I want to find out what happened to them."

The portrait frowned. "Oh. I wouldn't have seen the Hufflepuff students; they never come up here. And of course there is no proper Hufflepuff portrait that you can ask; from what I understand, that silly girl Helga simply put a painting of some _fruit_ by the entrance to Hufflepuff. _Fruit!_ Her mother must have wept when she heard that Godric had honored _his_ mother with a portrait. I hear that the Hufflepuffs don't even have passwords for their common room." She snorted. "All kinds of riffraff can come and go at will down there, apparently. I always did say that Helga was a foolish girl. God knows what my poor Godric ever saw in her..."

Harry blinked. "You don't mean that Godric Gryffindor and Helga Hufflepuff-?

"The less said about _that_ topic, my dear boy, the better," said the Fat Lady sternly. "Now, back to the question of the girls who vanished. It seems to me that the solution is pretty obvious, isn't it? That obstinate girl Helga insisted on letting students from all kinds of backgrounds into her house. I would think it was just a question of time before someone was sorted into her house that wasn't suited for Hogwarts at all. Helga may have forced the Sorting Hat to accept students who met _her_ standards, if you can call them standards, but sooner or later the school itself would object to housing the sort of riffraff she admitted. I think she had pushed too far and accepted students who should not have been here in the first place. And then Hogwarts itself rejected them, made them disappear." She have a satisfied little nod. "Yes, I think that is what must have happened."

Harry shuddered. There must have been days, he mused as he headed down the stairs again, when Godric Gryffindor had kicked himself hard for not commissioning a nice picture of a fruit bowl instead.

But the Fat Lady's words still swirled in his head. Was it possible, somehow, that Hogwarts itself was behind the mysterious disappearance of Sally-Anne Perks?


	6. Chapter 6

There was still time left before the others could be expected back from Hogsmeade. Should he dare to sneak into Dumbledore's office to speak to the headmasters' portraits? They might know something; perhaps the Sorting Hat had even been confounded in their presence. But when Harry approached the headmaster's office, he heard footsteps and voices within, and he withdrew hastily. Apparently, Dumbledore was in his office, entertaining a visitor. Harry thought he could make out Professor McGonagall's voice, curiously shrill, as if raised in protest.

Harry felt his thoughts swirl in his head. His rational mind could find no answer to the questions that haunted him, and he began to doubt that his fragmented memories of Sally-Anne would ever add up to a whole meaning or a clear picture. He found refuge in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom. After all, Myrtle was also an echo of the past, a figure almost as elusive as Sally-Anne.

He found Myrtle hovering indistinctly in one of the stalls. "Come to cry?" she asked hopefully. "Bathrooms are good for that, you know."

Harry merely shook his head and sat down next to her.

"Can you help me with something, Myrtle?"

Her immaterial form fluttered by his side. "Of course. Have you lost something?"

Harry sighed. "I suppose I have. I remember a girl, but she seems to have vanished into thin air, lost in some realm where things have no names. I don't even know if she is real any more..."

"Oh, dear." Myrtle sighed softly. "Have you fallen in love with a ghost?"

There was a expectant note in her voice, and Harry hastened to respond: "No, I'm not talking about a ghost. I don't know what she is. A memory, perhaps... Say, Myrtle, do _you_ remember her? She was sorted into Hufflepuff two years ago, and then she disappeared. Her name was Sally-Anne."

A shadow of a ghostly smile fell over Myrtle's mournful face. "Sally-Anne... Yes, I remember Sally-Anne. She used to come here and talk to me."

Harry felt his heart pound in his chest. "She did? She came here and talked to you?" His questions came tumbling out. "What was she like? What did she say? Was she a ghost or a girl? What happened to her?"

Myrtle leaned her head to one side and considered for a moment. Then she said, softly: "What was she like? She was unhappy. That's why she came in here, I suppose. When you haunt a bathroom, you get to see more tears than anyone could ever dream of. People always like to hide their tears, and this place is nice and private. At first, she didn't speak to me; she merely sat here, lost in some dismal thoughts of her own. But then she noticed me, and after a few days she began to talk. She didn't seem concerned at all that I was a... well, _you know what_, like some _other people _are. She just talked to me, as to a friend."

"What did she say-?" Harry's voice came out as a whisper.

Myrtle sighed. "Oh - She spoke of many things, and some of them didn't make sense. Her words were rambling at first, as if she didn't quite recollect how to speak. But then she grew more coherent. At first, she could not understand why she was here, at Hogwarts. She kept saying: "How can this _be_?" She spoke of Susan Bones, who had befriended her, and of her classes, and of the kind Professor Sprout. For a few days, she seemed quite excited the be at Hogwarts. She said she liked Susan so much more than Amaryllis. I have no idea who Amaryllis is, do you?"

Harry nodded, unable to speak. According to the Sorting Hat, Amaryllis Zeller had been one of the four girls sorted into Hufflepuff in 1896.

"Some friend of hers, I suppose," said Myrtle with a shrug. "As I said, Sally-Anne seemed happy enough at first. But then, a gradual change came over her; a sadness began to grow within her, and she spent more and more time in the bathroom crying. And then one day, she disappeared, and she never came back... I don't know where she went..."

"Neither do I," whispered Harry. "Oh, Myrtle, do you think she was _real_? Was she human?"

"Human?" Myrtle spoke softly. "Oh, yes, she was human. Perhaps that was the problem."

"What-?" Harry stared at the gloomy apparition by his side. "What do you mean?"

Myrtle shook her head. "She was human," she said quietly, "but she didn't want to be."

...

Ron and Hermione had returned from Hogsmeade flushed with excitement, their pockets bulging with sweets and flasks of butterbeer. Ron seemed to have recovered some of his old cheerfulness, and there was genuine empathy in his glance when he said to Harry: "Rotten luck, mate, being stuck here all day. Here- I brought you some chocolate frogs and fizzing whizzbees."

Harry accepted readily, more grateful for Ron's high spirits than for the candy.

"What did you do all day, anyway?" muttered Ron indistinctly, his mouth full of cockroach cluster.

"Oh - " Harry smiled. "I chatted with Myrtle for a bit. I'm starting to like her, actually."

"That bad, huh?" Ron was sympathetic. Hermione glanced up quickly, and Harry knew she must be anxious to hear about his conversation with Myrtle.

"Here - " Ron threw him another chocolate frog. "You've deserved it, Harry. Can't imagine what kind of chat you'd have with _Moaning Myrtle..._" He shuddered.

"We talked about Sally-Anne Perks," said Harry quietly. He wanted, desperately, to talk to his friend about Sally-Anne. Perhaps Ron would listen now, when Hogsmeade and its fantastic shops had left him in such a good mood?

"Who? Oh..." Ron frowned. "Are you still thinking about _her?_ This is getting _freaky._ You know she didn't exist, don't you? I know you've been through a lot in your life, mate, and that it's only natural that... that you start _seeing things_ sometimes. But seriously, if you can't let go of this weird obsession, maybe you should get some help. There is a healer at St. Mungo's that my Mum knows; she took Percy to see him when he suddenly grew fixated on measuring our garden gnomes a few years back. Maybe you need to go and see him..." Ron's voice trailed off as he saw the murderous expression on Hermione's face. "Well, I'm just trying to be _helpful,_" he said defensively.

Harry sighed and tore the wrapper violently off his chocolate frog. The card inside fell to the floor.

"_What-?_" Ron was staring at the card, transfixed, his freckled face white.

Harry looked at him curiously. "What's up, Ron? You all right?"

Ron whispered: "You've - you've got _The Lord of Aratta!_"

Harry picked the card up. Yes, it was indeed The Lord of Aratta.

"That's the rarest chocolate frog card of them all." Ron's voice trembled as he spoke. "There have been rumors of its existence, but no one has ever actually seen one... _And you are holding it in your hand!_"

Harry looked down at the Lord of Aratta, who smiled serenely back at him. "I suppose I am. Is it one you wanted?"

Ron looked at him as if Harry had, finally and unequivocally, taken leave of his senses. "_Is it one I wanted?_ As long as I can remember, people have been saying that this card doesn't really exist, that it's just a myth made up in order to sell more chocolate frogs. And yet, every child who has ever torn open a chocolate frog wrapper knows that there is always a moment when your heart beats with absurd anticipation as you open the silvery cover: Perhaps you will be the one. Perhaps you will be the one to find the Lord of Aratta... No one ever did, but we all still held our breaths every time someone gave us a chocolate frog. When I was little, I believed with all my heart that I would one day be the one to find the Lord of Aratta. When I grew older, I knew that the odds of finding one were almost non-existent. But somehow, that made my heart flutter even more when I ripped the cover off a chocolate frog." He smiled slightly. "If Dumbledore only knew how many times I had cursed him before I even came to Hogwarts! I swear, it seemed to me that every time I tore open a chocolate frog it had a portrait of that dratted _headmaster_ in it, instead of the fabled Lord of Aratta..."

Harry looked at him for a long time. Then he got up and handed Ron the card, silently.

"What's this?" Ron's voice quavered.

"You can have it, Ron," said Harry softly. "Have the Lord of Aratta if you want. I don't collect chocolate frog cards any more."

"You don't collect... Harry, I can't take it. Do you have any idea what this card is worth?"

"No. Listen, Ron, I really don't care about the card. I'd like you to keep it."

Ron stared at the card, an expression of disbelief on his freckled face. "Oh. Thanks, Harry. Wow, I don't know what to say..." A moment after he added: "Harry? I'm sorry about what I said just now, about your memories of that girl. Perhaps she really did exist... After all, the Lord of Aratta did, didn't he?"

Harry smiled. "Don't worry about it, Ron."

"Just wait till Fred and George see this - " Still dazed, Ron went off in search of fellow chocolate card collectors to show the miraculous card to. He must have suspected, correctly, that Hermione was not going to show much enthusiasm for the Lord of Aratta.

As soon as Ron was out of earshot, Hermione pulled a letter out of her pocket. "From my parents. It just arrived. They went to Somerset House this morning."

"And?"

Hermione shook her head. "Nothing. There was no record in the Muggle archives of a Sally-Anne Perks born either in 1980 or in 1885. Perhaps Sally-Anne was not her real name..."

Harry told her about his conversations with the Friar, the Fat Lady, and Moaning Myrtle. "I just don't know what to make of this any more," he said in a low voice. "If Sally-Anne remembered Amaryllis, I assume she must be the same girl who was sorted in 1896. But how can that be? Could she have had a time-turner?"

Hermione frowned. "I don't think that would be possible, Harry. No one could travel that far in time. She _must_ have been something like a ghost."

"The Friar and Myrtle both said that she was no ghost, and she certainly didn't look like one to me, in the brief moments I saw her."

Hermione was pale. "Well, another kind of entity, then, that is _like_ a ghost without being one... Perhaps the ghosts of Hogwarts can tell us more."

...

At midnight, Harry, Hermione and Dobby climbed the stairs to the astronomy tower for the appointed meeting with the shadows of the past. Harry had briefly considered asking Ron to accompany them, but Hermione had refused. "He's already _had_ his vision of the supernatural today," she said frostily.

The sight that met them at the top of the tower took Harry's breath away. Some two dozen incorporeal forms hovered in the starlit night, indistinct figures of captivating strangeness. Harry immediatelly recognized Nearly-Headless Nick, fantastically dressed in a shimmering doublet with flamboyant ruffles at his wobbly neck, as well as the Bloody Baron, a grotesque and mournful figure whose pearly-white coat was covered in sombre dark stains.

The specter of the Grey Lady hovered by the Baron's side, her pale ethereal beauty even more startling next to his terrible form. Harry recognized the shadowy aristocrat Sir Patrick Delaney-Podmore, who appeared to take great delight in removing his head from his amorphous neck at intervals. Moaning Myrtle flittered indistinctly among the gathered ghosts, but a shadow of an immaterial smile appeared when she saw Harry. Many of the fantastic figures assembled on the moon-washed roof were unfamiliar, but they saw the small, fragile figure of Professor Binns among them.

Harry, who had always thought of the ghostly professor as just another teacher, and a particularly tedious one at that, looked at the wizened little specter of Professor Binns with a sudden awe. Now that he saw the professor's form shimmering in the starlight among the other incorporeal ghosts, he realized with a sense of shock that Professor Binns was more than just an embodiment of tedium; he belonged to another, non-human domain, a realm of mystery and unreason.

The indistinct form of the Friar hovered in front of them. "Welcome, my late lamented lords and ladies," he said softly, "and welcome to our friends from the realm of the real. I have convened this Council of Ghosts because a matter of importance has been called to my attention, a question of remembrance and forgetting."

A palpitation went through the assembled ghosts, like a ripple though silvery water. Harry could feel Hermione tremble at his side, and her hand slipped into his.

"Tell us, Harry Potter," said the Friar, his voice strangely distant, like a voice from a dream, "about that which you remember. It seems that you, and you alone, are aware of a curious absence."

Harry drew his breath deeply. Still not completely certain whether he was awake or dreaming, he told the tale of the forgotten Sally-Anne to the spectral assembly. The pale Hermione and the wide-eyed Dobby supplemented details he had omitted. Dobby rattled off his "statistics", and Professor Binns muttered: "Ah, yes, _facts, _that's what we need, cold, hard facts." His voice was dry, like crumbling parchment. Harry smiled and wondered, suddenly, if Professor Binns' specter lingered at Hogwarts simply because he could not bear to be parted from the _facts_ of his history lessons.

"The question," said the Friar softly, "is how this little girl could vanish so completely. Her time here was extraordinarily brief, but even so, she should have been remembered. But memories were modified and records magically changed. It seems that someone wanted to ensure that this little girl would be forgotten. We do not normally interfere with the affairs of the living, but this imposed oblivion concerns us all. Remembrance is the one thing we all cherish; how truly horrifying it would be do vanish from everyone's memories." He looked around at the spectral forms assembled on the roof. "We will not permit her to be forgotten. My late lamented friends, what do you recall of Sally-Anne?"

The Grey Lady was the first to speak. "I believe I saw her once or twice, walking with her friend from Hufflepuff. I wouldn't normally have noticed her, but something about her captured my interest: She was a shy little new girl, and yet _she_ was the one who led the bolder Susan to their classrooms and explained to her how to find the way through the labyrinthine corridors. She was a timid little thing, and yet she walked through Hogwarts with a quiet confidence as if she was alrady familiar with the halls and corridors of the castle."

"Do you recall seeing her before, my lady?" Hermione's voice sounded small and fearful in the night.

The Grey Lady shook her head. "I cannot say. There have been so many children passing through this castle. One only remembers, after a while, the ones that are extraordinary."

"I fear she must have come to a violent end." The Bloody Baron's voice made Harry think of wind and darkness, and he felt himself shiver. "Perhaps her murderer bewitched the minds of those around her and made them forget her very existence in order to cover up his crime."

"But if she were murdered, wouldn't she have become a ghost?" suggested Nearly-Headless Nick gently.

"Ah." Professor Binns' creaky voice sounded feeble in the night. "But not all murder victims become ghosts, and not all ghosts are murder victims. But if she were the victim of a double crime as the Baron suggests, the extinction of both her life and her memory, then surely she would haunt this castle until her murderer was brought to justice."

The Friar nodded. "I believe you are right; she cannot have been murdered. But where could she have gone?"

"I do remember seeing her in my classes," said Professor Binns, adjusting his spectral glasses. "And once, _she asked a question_. That happens quite rarely, so I remember it well. Most of the time, the students are content to close their eyes and listen in silence. But Sally-Anne Perks asked a question. Now, let me see... What was it that she asked? Something about the history of Hogwarts, I seem to recall. Ah, yes. _She asked me if portraits have souls. _I assured her that they do not, that they are mere imprints of a person. Peeves told me once of a magical map of the school, fashioned by a band of students long ago, that showed the names of everyone in the school and their precise location in the building. It appears to have been lost some time ago, which is probably for the best; one can readily imagine that such a map could be used for all sorts of mischief. On such a map, one would be able to see, I would imagine, all beings that have both names and souls. All humans would show up on the map, but ghosts would not, since our souls are no longer fully _here. _One would not see the portraits, of course, and animals would not be visible on the map - "

"Animals don't have _souls_?" Dobby whispered. "Not even Mr. Potter's Hedwig?"

Professor Binns blinked at him. "Of course animals have souls, but they would not show up on the map because their true names are not known. Human wizards name their animals according their own whims, of course, but the animals' _own_ names, bestowed upon them by their parents at birth, are unknown to humans."

"What about house-elves, sir?" Dobby's voice was shaking.

An immaterial smile appeared on Professor Binns' spectral features. "Of course house-elves have souls. I dare say you would see hundreds of house-elves on that fabled map of Hogwarts."

"What? Are there house-elves at Hogwarts?" Hermione's voice was a whisper.

Dobby turned to her in surprise. "Yes, of course, Miss. Dobby is telling you about the meals prepared in the kitchens by the house-elves."

"_House-elves_ make the meals? I thought the kitchen simply had a magic of its own - " Harry could see that Hermione was upset.

"And of course there are areas of the school that may not show up on a map," mused Professor Binns. "A particular room may be unplottable for some reason, like the dreaded Chamber of Secrets..."

"What about people, sir?" asked Harry. "If a room can be invisible on the map, can a person be unplottable as well?"

"Of course, my dear boy." It was the Friar who answered. "You are surrounded by unplottable people at the moment."

Harry gazed around at the ephemeral figures of the ghosts. "Tell me," he whispered, "can a living person be unplottable as well?"

The Friar shook his head. "No, not even an invisibility cloak could do that. You would still have a soul and a name, you see, even if no one could see you."

"Unless, of course, you had been robbed of your soul and your name..." said the Bloody Baron darkly.

Harry felt Hermione's hand tremble in his, and he sensed Dobby inching closer to his side. The shimmering specters were all around them. For a moment, Harry imagined a lost map somewhere showing three dots alone on the top of a tower, surrounded by nothing at all.


	7. Chapter 7

"Lost in thoughts, Harry?"

Harry looked up, dazed, from his reverie. He had found a secluded spot under a white willow tree on the Hogwarts grounds where he could sit and think for a while. Its leaves, so silver-white in summer, had turned to gold in autumn, but now most of the golden leaves had fallen from the tree. The ground was chilly this time of year, but Harry didn't mind.

Professor Lupin stood next to him, grey and ragged as always. "Are you worried about Sirius Black?" he asked gently as he sat down next to Harry under the tree. "I think everyone was quite shaken up by last night's violent attack on the portrait of the Fat Lady. It's difficult to believe that anyone could feel such rage against a mere portrait."

Harry recalled the slashed canvas he had seen the night before, so furiously torn to pieces, and he shuddered a little. Poor Mrs. Gryffindor! "Professor Lupin, do you think it would be possible to harm a portrait? Not just the canvas, but the person in it? I know that the Fat Lady escaped to another portrait, but what if she hadn't? Would she have been hurt?"

Lupin thought for a moment. "I don't know, Harry. I shouldn't think so. A person in a portrait is not a real person after all, merely a memory of someone who once was. How could you hurt a memory?"

"Oh, I don't know." Harry's voice sank to a whisper. "Memory charms could delete a person from everyone's remembrance, couldn't they?"

Lupin looked surprised. "I suppose so. But neither a person in a portrait nor a person in our recollection is _really_ a human being, you know; memories are mere echoes of the real person. Although I suppose a memory can seem real enough at times..."

He smiled. "You are something of a portrait of James yourself, you know, but with a touch of Lily as well. It's so odd to see you sitting here; James used to sit under this very tree. You are so much like him, Harry. Sometimes I have to remind myself that you are _not_ James come back to life again."

Harry looked up at the professor's tired face. How odd to think that Lupin's grey eyes had once rested upon his father's living face... Had Lupin and his father ever sat beneath this tree together, like he and Harry were sitting now?

"Professor," he said hesitantly, "I was wondering if you could tell me if there is a way to bring a person back to life after they are gone." He heard a little sigh escape Lupin's lips and felt a gentle hand on his arm, and he hastened to add: "Oh, I don't mean my parents, Professor. I am not trying to find a way to bring them back or anything like that. This is just… an old puzzle that I came across, a sort of riddle."

"Oh, like in a book?" Lupin smiled. "I used to enjoy those books of riddles and enigmas when I was a boy. Let's hear it, then, Harry."

Harry thought for a moment. "Suppose… suppose a person disappears at age 11. He or she vanishes so completely that no one can even remember that person any more. Then he or she shows up many years later, still eleven years old. A week later the person disappears again, and no one can remember that person any more. How can this be?"

"Hmmm." There was a pensive frown on Lupin's face as he considered the riddle. "Is this person human?"

Harry nodded. "Yes, he or she is human. But still a little different from other humans."

"Mmm. Now, this is a tricky one." Lupin's face wrinkled in thought. "Why would no one remember him after he disappeared? Did others see him _before_ he disappeared?"

"Yes."

"I see. Is he a ghost?"

"No, not a ghost. The person is human."

Lupin smiled. "This is a most intriguing puzzle, Harry. I suppose some memory charm must be involved; that would explain how others could forget about his existence. But how could a human return after many years and be exactly the same age? Was there time travel involved? Or perhaps he drank the elixir of life? Maybe he found the sorcerer's stone?"

Harry recalled his encounter with the two-faced Quirrell in the underground chamber and shuddered.

"But why did the person disappear, then? Why would someone be erased from all recollection?"

Lupin considered. Then he grinned. "Ah. I think I have found the answer to your puzzle, Harry. You had me quite confused there for a while. The age doesn't quite fit, but otherwise the answer is quite obvious. Harry, this puzzle is about _Lord Voldemort_ isn't it?"

"About _Voldemort?_" Harry stared at Lupin. "You think Voldemort made the person disappear?"

Lupin shook his head. "No, I'm not saying that Voldemort was behind the disappearance; I'm saying that _he_ was the one who disappeared."

"The person who vanished was Voldemort himself?" Harry stared at Lupin, his heart filled with a sudden dread. _No, impossible!_

"Well, either Voldemort himself or someone very much like him. I think the point of the riddle is that someone had tried to make himself immortal, which explains the two appearances many years apart. But because that person's actions were unnatural and evil, someone else decided, after that first person's plans had somehow been thwarted, to erase all memories of what had happened. After all, Harry, if Lord Voldemort had succeeded in making himself immortal by means of the sorcerer's stone, and you then defeated him somehow, would you not consider erasing every memory of both him and his actions? Juts to make sure that no one else ever got a similar idea?"

Harry's mouth was so dry that it was difficult to speak. "Perhaps I would."

_But Sally-Anne was not Voldemort, she was just a child, _he thought desperately, _just_ _an ordinary little girl. Surely she could never turn into a dread figure like Voldemort? Could she have made herself eternal, and then turned into such a dark figure of horror that a kind soul decided, once she was vanquished, to erase her from all recollection?_

_No. No, the Sorting Hat said that there was no evil in Sally-Anne. _Harry found comfort in his recollection of the Sorting Hat's confident assertion that Sally-Anne was just an ordinary little girl. But something whispered, darkly, in his mind: _But wasn't Tom Riddle once an ordinary boy as well? _

He shook the odd thought out of his head and went to the Great Hall for tea, accompanied by Lupin. As they parted inside the hall and went to their separate tables, Lupin smiled fondly at him: "See you later, James." He did not appear to notice that he had used the wrong name, and Harry did not point it out to him.

…

Harry stood by the window and looked out at the snow-covered landscape. The familiar statues and bushes looked strangely different under the thick layer of snow. Was that the shape of a gargoyle or an angel? He suddenly found it hard to recall. How difficult it is to remember clearly; our memories are obscured by our forgetfulness, until only the outlines remain...

He was waiting for Hermione, a piece of parchment clutched in his hand. The map! The legendary magical map of Hogwarts was real, and he was holding it! It had indeed fallen into the wrong hands: The pale, freckled hands of Fred and George. Who knew what kinds of pranks they had pulled off by means of this fantastic map that allowed them to trace the movements of teachers and students through the halls of Hogwarts? Harry smiled a little at the thought. The would have known when the coast was clear and when it just appeared to be. If you could see all authority figures on a map, you could also see where they were _not_ and identify spaces open for mischief. But the twins had taken pity on Harry, who had become the Prisoner of Hogwarts every Hogsmeade day. They had decided, generously, that his need for freedom was greater than their urge to wreak havoc, and they had given him the map. Harry had been able to sneak off to Hogsmeade through one of the secret tunnels shown on the map, and he had learned the truth about his godfather Sirius Black, his parents' false friend... He shuddered.

He had spent hours already staring at the tiny moving dots on the map. How many of them there were, and how difficult it was to make them all out! In some places, where many people gathered, the dots became a blur; names were piled on names until the letters became a tangled mass without meaning. The solitary dots were easier to follow. He could see Hermione now, coming up the stairs to the common room, pausing for a moment midway up the staircase. Harry frowned. Why did she suddenly stop? Oh, the portrait of course! She was speaking to Sir Cadogan, who had gallantly taken over until the Fat Lady had time to recover. But on the map, it appeared that Hermione was standing there alone.

Where was Ron? Harry scanned the map until he found Ron's dot, in a large group of boys out on the grounds. The dots were moving back and forth - perhaps they were playing with a ball? Someone named Peter something-or-the-other was apparently determined not to let Ron get the ball, for his dot remained doggedly right over Ron's.

Hermione entered the common room and flung her schoolbag down. The loud thud it made as it hit the floor made Harry suspect that it contained the usual two dozen books or so. Harry looked at the map: They were indeed the only two people in the common room.

"Dobby?" He spoke into the air while staring intently at the dots in the kitchen. There were so many of them that the names attached to them were quite unreadable. One dot emitted a brief flash and vanished, and a new dot appeared next to his own in the common room.

"Harry Potter called?" Dobby was by his side, still holding a potato peeler in one hand, a graceful curl of potato peel dangling from it. He must have been helping with dinner. Hermione took it gently from him and put it down.

The three of them huddled around the map, watching the dots float across the parchment. The movements of the dots formed intricate and beautiful dark patterns across the yellowed parchment, and Harry suddenly felt as if he was looking at some abstract work of art. _Each dot is part of a larger pattern, _he thought, but he realized as he looked that the patterns themselves were fleeting, illusory, always changing.

There was Lupin under the tree, and there was Dumbledore in his office. Peeves was in Mr. Filch's office, perhaps being berated for some recent misbehavior. But Peeves' dot kept moving back and forth, so clearly he wasn't listening very closely. Wait, why was Peeves on the map?

"Look!" He pointed Peeves' dot out to Dobby and Hermione. "There's Peeves! But I thought ghosts didn't show up on the map..."

"They don't," said Hermione thoughtfully. "Look over here. I passed Nearly-Headless Nick on the stairs, but he is not on the map. Neither are the other ghosts. See, Moaning Myrtle does not appear in the bathroom. But Peeves is different; he is not a ghost, but a poltergeist. He is not the lingering memory of a person who once lived, but a different kind of creature altogether, a wild elemental being who thrives on chaos. Oh, look, he appears to be attacking Mr. Filch-"

They all watched in silence as the dot marked Peeves jumped on top of the one that bore Filch's name, then whizzed in the direction of the astronomy tower. Filch's dot remained motionless for a moment, then moved slowly toward McGonagall's office, presumably to report the incident.

Harry began to look at the larger structures on the map, rather than the individual dots. Hogwarts, with all its familiar rooms, was there, but some parts were missing.

He pointed at the map. "The Chamber of Secrets should be right here, but it's not on the map because it's unplottable. I suppose there could be other unplottable rooms at Hogwarts as well..." A sudden thought struck him. "You don't suppose that Sally-Anne could be... _there, _do you? In the Chamber of Secrets?" He felt a chill at the thought.

But Hermione shook her head. "After what happened down there last year, the chamber was searched thoroughly. McGonagall told me about it. What if the basilisk had laid an egg down there or something? There was nothing there, Harry, apart from a dead basilisk."

"How'd they get in there anyway? I thought I was the only Parseltongue in school; how did they open the chamber?"

Hermione shrugged. "Apparently, you had left in partly open." She pointed at the owlery. "Look at this; the owls don't show up on the map, do they? So you can't use the map to find a lost pet... As the ghosts told us, animals have souls, but they still don't show up on the map because their true names are unknown, unplottable. Look, you can't see Fawkes in Dumbledore's office either."

"I wonder how the map can know everyone's names," said Harry thoughtfully.

"All names have magic," said Hermione. "There is a magical connection between a person and his or her name. It's the same sort of magic that makes spells possible. For example..."

She fished her wand out of her pocket and waved it gracefully in the air.

"_Papilio_!"

A delicate lavender butterfly flew from her wand, its fragile wings so thin they were almost transparent. It fluttered round the room for a moment, then settled on the back of a chair. It remained there for a moment before fading and slowly dissolving into nothingness.

"Spells are essential to magic itself," said Hermione softly, "because of the magical connection between names and reality. I can say _Papilio_ and conjure up an imitation of a butterfly, but I can't use the same spell to conjure up a bird. Even a wordless spell requires that you say the spell in your mind. Names _are _magic."

"Perhaps," whispered Dobby, "that is why wizards will only allow house-elves to have _one_ name, instead of two."

Hermione drew her breath and stared, bewitched, at the dots congregated in the kitchen. It was almost impossible to make out individual names in the chaos of moving dots, but the blurry names, one on top of the other, were clearly shorter than the ones they saw elsewhere on the map. Harry had a feeling that Hermione would soon see to it that house-elves were informed of their right to carry a second name as well. But which names would those be? The names of their masters? That didn't seem right. Perhaps they would all have an X after their names to indicate that their last names had been robbed from them. Like Malcolm X. _Dobby X..._ Harry rather liked the idea.

"At least the house-elves are on the map," said Dobby cheerfully. "But animals and ghosts and portraits are not."

"Neither is the Sorting Hat," said Hermione, scrutinizing Dumbledore's office. "I don't think it really has a soul; it is just the ambitions and discernment of the four founders concentrated into one magical object."

Harry stood for a moment, lost in thought. Then he said: "I wonder what would happen if someone changed their name? When Tom Riddle became Voldemort, did his dot change names as well? If he came into the castle now, would his dot say Tom Riddle or Voldemort, I wonder?"

"I suppose," said Hermione, her voice shaking a little, "that it would depend on whether his soul had been transformed as well as his name."

She stared fixedly at the map. "Oh, there's Ron again. Seriously, is he in _love_ with that Peter person? They seem completely inseparable. What's his last name? Petrie... No, I can't read it. It's amazing how much information this map contains." She fingered the golden chain around her neck. "If only there was a way to turn this map back to the day we were sorted..."

"Try it!" said Harry eagerly.

Hermione looked doubtful. She pulled out the golden time turner, removed it from her neck and held it over the map. Slowly, she turned the golden clockwork a little. No change could be seen on the map.

"Dobby thinks it would work better if it touched the map, Miss."

Hermione looked at the little house-elf for a moment. "Good idea, Dobby," she whispered. "Perhaps you two can hold the map while I spin the clockwork..."

Harry and Dobby held the parchment horizontally between them, and Hermione placed the time turner directly underneath the map, touching the parchment. Then she began to turn the dial.

It was working! Suddenly the little dots began to move in furious bursts of speed. Time was rewinding before their eyes.

"How do we know what time it is?" asked Harry bewildered. "On the map, I mean?"

"Look carefully," said Hermione evenly. "The brief moments when the dots are not moving are nights. And look, now the castle is almost empty; all the students have left. This must be last summer, when everyone went home. Now we are back in our second year; that's Mr. and Mrs. Weasley hugging Ginny after the ordeal in the Chamber of Secrets. See, your dot disappeared from the map; you are in the chamber of secrets. And that's you and Ron in the Slytherin common room talking to Malfoy. Good thing he didn't have this map, or he would have known you weren't Crabbe and Goyle! And there I am in the bathroom..."

Harry stared at Hermione's dot. He recalled her horror at being partially transformed into a cat by the Polyjuice potion. But the map wasn't fooled; her dot was still clearly marked "Hermione Granger".

"Oh, look, there's Dobby, and there's Colin Creevey's dot following yours around, Harry. And this must be Christmas, because the castle is much emptier... And this is Halloween, look at us in the dungeon for the Deathday party..."

Harry looked at the dungeon. He remembered Nearly-Headless Nick's Deathday party, attended by scores of ghosts, and yet the map showed no party, simply three dots wandering aimlessly in a dungeon.

"Oh, my goodness!" Hermione sounded startled. "The Whomping Willow really _did_ give you and Ron a beating, didn't it"

Harry looked at the two dots marked "Harry Potter" and "Ronald Weasley" rattling mysteriously back and forth right outside the castle. The Whomping Willow was not on the map, of course, and neither was the flying car.

"Summer again" said Hermione softly. "Oh. Look at McGonagall, how much time she spends in the library over the summer! And now we are back in our first year." A shaky little gasp escaped her. "Look at Quirrell... His dot has a strange sort of superscript on it..."

Harry saw that Quirrell's name had another attached to it, a minuscule name above the first, written so close to the name "Quirrell" that the letters were touching, merging: "_Voldemort_".

"You were right, Harry," Hermione whispered. "I suppose Tom Riddle really _did_ change so completely that his soul was transformed as well. The map recognizes him as "You-Know-Who"..."

"No, it doesn't," said Harry, slightly irritated. "The map has the courage to use his real name."

Hermione ignored him and went on: "Oh, that's you talking to Dumbledore, Harry. It must be Christmas; the castle in almost empty. And there's your dot looking a little blurry - you must have been wearing your Invisibility Cloak. Oh, and this is Halloween, let's go slowly, so we don't go back too far and miss the sorting. There I am in the bathroom... The troll had a _name? _Well, well, well..." They stared at the map as Harry and Ron's dots attacked a dot marked "Thrivaldi".

"There we are, going to Hagrid's for tea," said Hermione breathlessly. "Pay attention now - the previous day was the sorting. This is the night before, and here's the welcoming feast. There were are at the house tables. I can't see Sally-Anne at the Hufflepuff table, can you? I see Susan Bones and Hannah Abbot - why isn't she with them? Oh, this is the Sorting. Look, that's you being sorted, Harry! Your dot is by itself in the front. And... why is nothing happening? I don't remember a pause between sortings. And that's Parvati Patil being sorted, and that's Padma..." Hermione's voice trailed off.

The three of them stared at the map, at the sea of dots and names. There was no dot marked "Sally-Anne Perks", only a small empty spot at the Hufflepuff table between Susan Bones and Hannah Abbott where Sally-Anne should have been.


	8. Chapter 8

_[**Author's note: **Thanks for all the reviews! I love reading your theories and comments! Yes, **ImLostForever, Lily Riverstone,** and **whateveritis12** are right - in the canon, Lupin is not afraid of using Voldemort's name. Thanks for pointing out my error; I have gone back and fixed it. **XL **- the question of why Harry didn't notice that there had been a Peter in his dorm since year one when he looks back in time with the help of the map is a good one. But the same question applies to the canon as well: Why didn't Fred and George notice Peter in the dorm before they gave the map to Harry? I think the answer must be the same in both cases: The map is full of tiny dots, and it's impossible to focus on everything at once. Fred and George must have been more interested in mischief-making than in tracking Ron on the map, and Harry, Hermione, and Dobby are more interested in "rewinding" the map to the time of the sorting than in looking at who was in the Gryffindor dormitory._]

...

"But this doesn't make any sense." Hermione's voice was trembling now. "There is no Sally-Anne on the map, just a space where she should have been. But _all _humans should show up on the map."

"So therefore she is not human," Harry whispered. "And yet the Sorting Hat said she was... How can someone be _both _human and not human at the same time?"

"Perhaps she is an unplottable human being, Harry Potter, sir," suggested Dobby. He stared at the magical map with enormous eyes, as if he could somehow spot the invisible Sally-Anne by looking extra closely.

Hermione started twirling her hair again. "We know of three kinds of unplottable beings: Ghosts, animals, and portraits. The ghosts who saw her said that she was not one of them. That only leaves _animals and portraits_."

"Unless we have overlooked something, Miss."

Hermione looked thoughtfully at the little towel-clad house-elf. She nodded. "Yes, unless we have overlooked something."

Hermione had removed the time-turner from the map now, and Harry saw the Hogwarts of the present unfold on the map again where the past had been moments before. There was Filch, prowling along the third floor corridor, but his faithful Mrs. Norris did not seem to be on the map. He imagined Filch's dot being trailed by an invisible companion dot. Could it be that Sally-Anne was still lingering at Hogwarts, her dot invisible like Mrs. Norris'?

"Could she have been an animagus, like Professor McGonagall?" he said slowly. "Perhaps the map simply can't see her when she is in her animal form." Then he shook his head. "No, that doesn't make any sense; McGonagall shows up on the map when she is human, doesn't she? We saw her on the map before. Perhaps she even shows up on the map when she is a cat, since she is _actually_ human. But Sally-Anne was human during the sorting, and yet she was not on the map."

"A portrait, then," whispered Hermione. "Perhaps Sally-Anne was a portrait, made to come alive through some extraordinary magic."

For a moment, Harry envisioned the formidable Fat Lady descending the stairs of Gryffindor Tower to mingle among the living. He shuddered a little at the thought. If a Hogwarts portrait were to be brought to life, he would much prefer the jolly eternally tipsy friars with their endless vat of wine. He could well imagine that the high-spirited Franciscans might even teach Fred and George a thing or two about keeping the masses entertained. But a portrait, come alive? He shook his head, doubtfully.

"What sort of magic could make a person in a portrait come alive?" he pondered. "A portrait is a mere memory of a person, an imprint without a soul."

Hermione thought about it for a moment. "Beings without a soul would not show up on the map, and Sally-Anne was not visible on the map. So perhaps Sally-Anne _was _a portrait, brought to life by someone who loved her... No, the Sorting Hat said she was a human girl, didn't it?" She twisted a strand of hair into such a tangled knot that Harry wondered if she would ever get it untangled again.

"Harry Potter, sir!" Dobby was tugging at his sleeve. "Dobby thinks we should rewind the map even further, sir, and see if the _other _girl from Hufflepuff is on the map."

Harry looked at him with approval and nodded quickly. "Good idea, Dobby. Let's do it."

Harry and Dobby unfurled the map again and held it out between them while Hermione placed the time turner under it. This time, she spun the dial further than before, and the tiny dots on the map began to move at a dizzying pace. In his mind, Harry tried to keep track of the years, but he soon got lost in the rapidly moving patterns. Hermione began to look confused as well, but Dobby called out the years softly as the countless little dots whirled around on the map. Harry marveled at the house elf's ability to keep track of the flying dots; perhaps years of being inundated with the demands of the Malfoy family had made him develop some sort of marvelous power of concentration.

_1989._ There were Fred and George, being sorted into Gryffindor, along with Lee Jordan and Angelina Johnson. There was Bill Weasley, and there was Charlie... How exactly did Charlie contrive to spend so much time on the Quidditch field without failing all his classes? There was Percy, spending an inordinate amount of time in the boys' bathroom; Harry wondered if he was crying or grooming. Probably the latter, he decided.

_1987, 1985, 1983..._ Now there were many more unfamiliar names on the map. Had Charlie Weasley really played one-on-one Quidditch with Gwenog Jones?

19_81, 1979, 1977..._ Harry stared, bewitched, at the minuscule dots that bore names that he knew so well: James Potter, Lily Evans, Sirius Black, Severus Snape, surrounded by a sea of unknown names. He noted, with a smile, that Lupin's dot stayed close to his father's. And there was Sirius, the traitor, and Peter Pettigrew, who was to become Sirius' victim. Harry shuddered. But why was Snape's dot following his mother's? She must have been terribly annoyed by that. Perhaps he was begging her to allow him to copy her potions homework... Harry smiled to himself at the thought. He reached out and touched his mother's dot with his finger. If only there was a way to lift that little dot out of the map and into reality! He wondered if there existed a spell powerful enough to do that. _If I could bring my mother and father out of this map and into the real world, _he thought suddenly, _I wonder what would happen to their dots. Perhaps their dots would disappear, leaving only an empty space behind... Like Sally-Anne's dot..._

_1975... _What was wrong with the map? It seemed to have frozen; all the dots were still all of a sudden. Then slowly, they faded from the parchment altogether, and the map turned blank.

"What's wrong?" Harry stared at the empty parchment.

"I think we have reached the beginning," said Hermione calmly. "This must have been when the map was created. Perhaps the map is unable to discern what happened before it came into being."

"So then we will not be able to see what happened in 1865." Harry was disappointed.

"Not on the map, no," said Hermione softly. "But the magical school records would go back much further than that, wouldn't they? I think we need to pay McGonagall's office a visit tonight. We have Dobby's copies of the school records, but we will need the originals. Hopefully, the time turner will be able to show us earlier versions of the school records as well." She shook her head, ruefully. "Funny, isn't it? I spent so much time reading magical theory, trying to find a way to link the time turner to another magical object; I didn't think of merely putting the two magical objects together. It was so simple I just never thought of it until Dobby suggested that we try it."

_People don't understand because things are too simple. _Harry suddenly recalled what Susan Bones had said about passwords. _Perhaps_, he thought to himself, _the truth about Sally-Anne is also so simple that we can't see it._

...

As they headed down to the Great Hall for tea, Harry and Hermione passed a tabby cat on the stairs.

"Good afternoon, Professor," they chorused politely, and the cat seemed to flicker for an instant before assuming the familiar form of Professor McGonagall.

"The older students always recognize me, don't they?" She shook her head sadly. "Ah, well, I can still catch an unsuspecting first year student or two breaking the rules in front of me when I am in my feline form." She adjusted her spectacles, which looked so remarkably like the markings around the eyes of the tabby cat.

"Professor, what is it like?" Harry asked impulsively. "Being a cat, I mean?"

"What is it like to be a cat?" Professor McGonagall looked thoughtfully at him. "An excellent question, Harry, and one that surprisingly few students have ever asked. Perhaps cats are simply so familiar to most of us that it is easy to forget that they are, after all, entirely different from human beings." She smiled, a faraway look in her eyes. "The first time I turned into a cat, I was a little girl. It was the most wonderful and unnerving experience of my life. It's so... so_ different, _you see, being a cat. It's not simply your appearance that changes; polyjuice potion alone can do that, as you may know." A twinkle in her eyes suggested to Harry that perhaps McGonagall was not, after all, wholly unacquainted with their experiments with polyjuice potion last year, and he felt himself blush a little.

"Being a cat," continued McGonagall softly, "is more than just having the appearance of a cat; it's having the mind and the senses of a cat. When I first began to transform into a cat, I thought I would go mad with all the overwhelming smells, the startlingly clear sounds, the unbearable brightness of daylight... But gradually I began to adjust, and I realized that I had never been properly aware of the world around me before I became a cat. Humans don't notice _anything; _as humans, we are surrounded by all these wondrous scents and noises our senses are too dull to perceive and our minds too lazy to process. We tend to think that humans and cats inhabit the same world; only rarely do humans realize that it's not the same world at all. Cats are _aware _of their surroundings, you see, whereas humans stumble around blindly, not noticing anything."

"Have you ever been tempted to stay a cat, Professor?" asked Hermione shyly.

McGonagall smiled. "I cannot deny that I have considered that possibility at times, Miss Granger, especially when faced with a particularly appalling stack of transfiguration essays. But if I stayed in my cat form for too long, I would lose my desire to go back to human form, and then who would keep an eye on Gryffindor House? _Someone_ has to look after you, you know."

"You would never let a Gryffindor student be forgotten like Sally-Anne, would you, Professor?" whispered Harry. Was it his imagination, or did McGonagall hesitate for a moment before she answered?

"I would never let _anyone _at Hogwarts be forgotten if I can help it, Mr. Potter. Not even the unsuitable young man I had three awkward dates with in 1942, although I _have _tried to suppress the details of that memory."

Hermione laughed, but Harry asked curiously: "What was his name, Professor?"

"_Harry!" _Hermione gave him a swift kick in the shins. "That is hardly any of our business, is it?"

But McGonagall didn't look offended; she merely gave Harry a long, appraising glance before replying: "Perhaps, Miss Granger, it is better to ask too many questions than too few. I don't mind telling you his name, Mr. Potter. It is a name that will be familiar to you." Harry thought he detected a slight tremor in her voice. "His name was Tom Riddle."

"_Voldemort?_"

"He had not yet become He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named at that time. He was merely a schoolboy, and a charming one at that. But believe me, Mr. Potter, there have been times when I wished I could erase the memory of those three visits to Hogsmeade from all recollection."

"But you didn't."

McGonagall sighed. "No, I didn't. I believe, you see, that even a memory as embarrassing as that one should not be deleted. If we allow our past mistakes to be forgotten, we risk making similar mistakes in the future. I would like to think that I am better equipped to fight for all that is good now that I understand how easy it is to be enchanted by evil..." Her voice trailed off. She stood for a moment, lost in thought. Then she said, briskly: "Now, run along and get some tea, will you? I believe the headmaster is already in the Great Hall."

_The headmaster is already in the Great Hall? _Harry and Hermione exchanged a quick glance and set course, in wordless agreement, for the headmaster's office.

They found the spacious circular room empty, except for Fawkes, who was looking particularly bedraggled and moribund this afternoon, the dozing Sorting Hat, and the row of solemn portraits on the walls.

They stood for a moment and regarded the portraits in silence. Some of the names engraved on the frames of the portraits were familiar to Harry. Armando Dippet, a fragile, balding little man, had been headmaster before Dumbledore. Phineas Nigellus Black, a haughty wizard with a pointed beard, was no doubt related to the escaped death eater Sirius Black. And wasn't the nervous-looking Quentin Trimble the author of one of their first year textbooks? Oh, yes, _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection. _Harry looked doubtfully at Professor Trimble; he had a slightly panicked look about him, as if he had just received news that the Dark Forces would be closing in on him any minute now. He also recognized Phyllida Spore, a lovely witch dressed in green, as the author of their first year herbology book.

"Good afternoon, children," one of the portraits said pleasantly. The portrait that had spoken was a jolly-looking witch in old-fashioned clothes. Harry peered at her frame and made out the name "Dilys Derwent".

"Good afternoon, Professor Derwent," he said shyly. "My name is Harry Potter, and this is my friend Hermione Granger."

"Oh, I know who you are," she replied with a smile. "The famous Harry Potter! We heard you speaking to the Sorting Hat the other day, of course. We have been talking about your little mystery ever since haven't we Everard?"

"Indeed we have," said the portrait of a rather dashing man, dressed in a white shirt with an inordinate number of ruffles. "A most intriguing riddle, Mr. Potter, most intriguing indeed."

"Not much to do around here, you see," came the disdainful voice of Phineas Nigellus Black. "One does get tired of watching Dumbledore work on his still unfinished encyclopedia of goblin humor."

"Have you come any closer to solving the mystery of the girl who disappeared?" asked Phyllida Spore eagerly. "Her disappearance is troubling to us all, but even more so to me, since she was a student in my house."

"Please, Professor Spore," said Hermione, gazing up at the portrait of the former headmistress, "there were _two_ girls who disappeared: Sally-Anne Perks, and an unknown Hufflepuff student who vanished in 1896."

Phyllida Spore smiled at her. "Oh, we are aware of that, my dear, but only one of those disappearances is really a _mystery_. The Sorting Hat may not remember the first girl's name, but I certainly do."

Harry stared at her. "_You remember her name_?"

"Yes, of course I do. One cannot alter the memory of a portrait, you see, except by destroying the portrait. We _are_ memories, my dear boy, and we recollect precisely what our once living counterparts remembered, nothing less and nothing more. The lady I represent, Professor Spore, was headmistress of Hogwarts in 1896, and I remember everything she ever knew about the students who were here in her time."

Harry's heart hammered in his chest. "Who was she, then, the fifth girl who was sorted into Hufflepuff in 1896? Can you speak her name?"

"Of course I can," said Professor Spore gently. "But there was no particular mystery about her disappearance. The poor little girl was mentally disturbed, you see. She came from an old magical family, and they wanted to send her to Hogwarts. But it soon became clear that her mind was terribly troubled, and she could not control her magic at all. She caused one unintentional accident after another, poor child, and the family decided to withdraw her from school after only a week. One of her relations later removed the name from the school records to conceal what he felt was an embarrassment to the family."

"What was her name?" Harry's voice came out as a whisper.

"Her name was Ariana. _Ariana Dumbledore._"

"Professor Dumbledore's sister?" Hermione's voice was almost inaudible.

Professor Spore nodded. "Yes, his sister. Poor little girl; she died a few years later. Professor Dumbledore never got over her death. I don't think he is over it even now, after all these years."

"Oh." Harry stood still, trying to understand. He felt Hermione's hand slip gently into his, and he squeezed it gratefully. "But if she... _died, _how did her bring her back?"

"Bring her back? Don't be an idiot, boy," said Professor Black portrait contemptuously. "She was _dead._"

"But we have reason to believe, sir, that the two girls who disappeared ninety-five years apart were one and the same," said Hermione. Phineas Nigellus Black snorted, but Hermione went on: "Please tell me, Professor Spore, what Ariana Dumbledore looked like."

"Ariana?" Professor Spore considered for a moment. "She was a pale and timid little thing, with light hair and freckles. Her eyes were blue, like her brother's."

Harry took a piece of parchment and a quill from Dumbledore's desk. "Did she look like this?" Harry had never been particularly good at drawing, but was able to sketch a passable portrait of Sally-Anne, which he held out to Professor Spore. Her eyes widened when she saw his sketch, and she nodded silently.

"Are you suggesting, children, that Sally-Anne Perks and Ariana Dumbledore was the same person?" The man who had been addressed as Everard sounded confused. "I don't see how that is possible. As Phineas was saying, Ariana died over ninety years ago. How could she be the same person who vanished from Hufflepuff House two years ago? That is simply not possible."

"There is some dark force at work behind this mystery, mark my words," whispered Quentin Trimble's portrait. He cast a rapid glance over his shoulder, as if he suspected that the dark forces were somehow hidden in his canvas.

"Oh, don't be ridiculous, Quentin," scolded Dilys Derwent. "Dark forces, my hat. Let's just use our common sense about this, shall we? Ariana Dumbledore is dead. I attended her funeral myself. I remember it well; such a sad affair it was! Since no magic on earth can bring the dead back to life, it is impossible for Sally-Anne and Ariana to be the same person."

"What if she was a portrait, like one of you?" asked Harry hesitantly. "If a portrait was painted of her after her death, would it be possible to bring that portrait to life? Could she have stepped out of her portrait to become a student at Hogwarts once more?"

Professor Derwent looked at him with pity. "My dear child, if it was possible for a portrait to come alive again, don't you think _our_ loved ones would have brought us back as well?"

"_Your_ loved ones, perhaps." Phineas Nigellus Black sounded bitter. "I can't speak for my own ungrateful descendants."

"No one can bring a person in a portrait back to life," said Phyllida Spore softly. "Not even Albus Dumbledore."

"Sally-Anne was _not_ a portrait," muttered the Sorting Hat sleepily from the shelf. "She was a real girl."

"And yet," whispered Professor Spore, "the portrait you just sketched, Harry, based on your recollection of Sally-Anne, shows Ariana's face..."

Harry squeezed Hermione's hand and looked up at the row of portraits, helplessly. "But then... then none of this makes any sense. This is all _impossible..."_

"Unless," said Hermione quietly, "we have overlooked something."


	9. Chapter 9

As Harry and Hermione descended the winding staircase from the headmaster's office, the indistinct murmur of voices from the Great Hall floated towards them. Everyone else was still at tea.

"McGonagall's office," whispered Hermione quickly. "The school records... come on, Harry, let's hurry and take a look at the school records before she gets back from tea."

Harry and Hermione set off together for McGonagall's office, but to their great disappointment, they found her door locked.

Hermione looked rapidly up and down the empty corridor, then drew her wand. "_Alohomora!"_ she whispered, but the door did not move. Apparently, McGonagall locked her doors quite carefully.

Hermione tried half a dozen more spells, but nothing happened.

"How many unlocking spells do you know, Hermione?" asked Harry in wonder. "You would make an awesome burglar in the Muggle world, you know. Like Raffles. Or the French gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Or the gallant Norwegian Gjest Baardsen. " Mrs. Figg's book collection had been interesting, if somewhat narrow. Tales of dashing cat-burglars had, for some reason, occupied a rather prominent place in her collection.

Hermione looked at him in surprise. "Oh, you _do_ read books, after all?" She grinned. "Well, if you'd also read _Hogwarts, A History, _you would have known that all the gentlemen you just mentioned were wizards, not Muggles, although they used their magic for rather dubious purposes."

She pointed her wand at the door again and said with determination: _"Ethpthah!" _But the door remained stubbornly closed.

"_Damn! _McGonagall really knows how to lock a door!" Hermione was frustrated now. But as they were about to turn away from the locked door in despair, the heavy oak door suddenly swung open.

Dobby stood on the threshold, beaming at them. "Harry Potter, sir, and Miss Granger! Dobby was wondering who was rattling the door. Dobby did not know it was you, or he would have opened the door sooner. Dobby thought it was time to look at the school records again, Harry Potter, sir."

They stepped gratefully into the room and closed the door behind them.

"How did you get in here, Dobby?" asked Harry curiously. Could it be, he wondered, that Dobby knew more unlocking spells than Hermione? No, impossible.

The little elf shrugged. "Dobby apparated into Professor McGonagall's office, sir."

Hermione stared at him. "But that's not possible, Dobby. It is impossible to apparate within the walls of Hogwarts; it says so in _Hogwarts, A History_. In the very first chapter." Then she frowned. "No, wait, you already apparated into the Gryffindor common room, didn't you? But the book..."

"Ah, but Dobby thinks that book was written by a wizard, Miss Granger. And wizards don't know everything there is to know about magic, begging your pardon, Miss. _Wizards _can't apparate and disapparate inside the school, but house-elves can. Dobby thinks the author of that book never talked to house-elves, Miss."

"_Really?" _Hermione looked as if she was in shock.

"Here, Miss. Dobby has found the school records from 1896." Dobby pointed to the old vellum-covered book that lay open on Professor McGonagall's desk.

Harry and Hermione leaned over the ancient volume. The names of the four girls who had been sorted into Hufflepuff House in the year 1896 were entered in an elegant hand. But wasn't there a blank space there as well? Yes, there was room for one additional name.

"Hermione, the time turner-" whispered Harry.

Hermione removed the time turner from her neck and placed it under the page with a trembling hand. Then she spun the dial, rapidly. Dobby stood on the tips of his toes so he could see better.

The three of them stared at the yellowed page, which was covered in florid, old-fashioned handwriting. At first nothing happened. But then, after a few minutes, something seemed to happen to the empty space on the page. A new name appeared where there had been nothing seconds before. Harry felt his heart hammer in his chest as he read aloud: "Abbott, Dorothea. Doge, Hazel. _Dumbledore, Ariana._ Sprout, Demeter. Zeller, Amaryllis."

She had been there! Ariana Dumbledore had been at Hogwarts for a few days in 1896, before her name had been erased from the school records. _Ariana Dumbledore had attended Hogwarts for seven days, just like Sally-Anne._

"Let's go forward in time and see what the records looked like in the autumn of 1991," said Hermione eagerly. She pulled the time turner away from the page, and Harry watched in fascination as the name _Ariana Dumbledore _slowly faded away without leaving as much as a trace behind.

Hermione turned the pages of the book rapidly until she found the year 1991. A total of nine names appeared under the heading "First Year Students, Hufflepuff House". There were five boys' names entered, followed by the names of four girls. But wasn't there a space on this page as well, between Megan Jones and Leanne Robinson?

Hermione placed the time turner under the list again and turned the dial. Harry held his breath. Which name would appear on the list now? Sally-Anne Perks, or Ariana Dumbledore?

Slowly, as if it was being written by an invisible hand, a new name appeared on the list_: "Sally-Anne Perks"_.

"Look," whispered Hermione. "The name has quotation marks around it. None of the other names do." She was right; tiny quotation marks could be seen hovering before and after the name, as if the ancient book felt compelled to note that it had not for a moment believed that "Sally-Anne Perks" was the girl's true name.

"Look in the margin, Miss," squeaked Dobby. And sure enough, in the margin there appeared a tiny mark, almost too small to see, consisting of two letters: AD. Did they stand for Sally-Anne's true initials, or were they the initials of the person who had recorded the name?

Without warning, a loud crack sounded in the stillness of the room, and Harry and Hermione looked around, startled. Dobby was no longer by their side. Where had he gone?

The next instant, the door opened, and Professor McGonagall entered her office accompanied by Snape. Harry's heart sank.

"A most interesting theory, Severus," McGonagall was saying, "but I do not believe that substituting catnip for pennyroyal would make the potion have the same effect on cats as on humans. But you are of course very welcome to help yourself to my personal store of catnip-"

She broke off abruptly as she caught sight of Harry and Hermione. "Oh..."

The black-clad potions master regarded the two Gryffindors with some interest. "It seems that we have a pair of intruders on our hands," he said smoothly. "I thought you usually lock your door, Minerva?"

"I... yes, I do. Mr. Potter and Miss Granger, I do not understand how you come to be here-?"

_We are in trouble now, _thought Harry. _Not even Hermione can talk her way out of this..._

But as it turned out, he was mistaken. Without hesitating for a moment, Hermione beamed at the two professors. She seemed so delighted to see them, in fact, that anyone might have thought that the two teachers had just walked in on her completing an extra credit assignment at midnight, rather snooping around a professor's locked office at tea time.

A moment before, there had been a triumphant glint in Snape's eye, and Harry suspected that a particularly unpleasant punishment for Gryffindor students caught breaking and entering had just occurred to him. But the glint faded slowly as he looked at Hermione's confident smile.

"What - what is the meaning of this, Miss Granger?" he asked, with a quick glance at Professor McGonagall.

"We are just doing our homework, sir," said Hermione pleasantly.

"_Homework_?" The familiar sarcasm was back in Snape's voice now. "And pray tell me, Miss Granger, which Hogwarts professor required you to break in to another professor's office in her absence?"

"You did, sir," replied Hermione sweetly.

"I... what?" There was a puzzled expression on Snape's pale features now. "Miss Granger, have you taken leave of your senses?"

"We were simply completing the extra credit assignment you gave us at the beginning of term, sir," said Hermione innocently.

"Extra credit assignment?" Snape stared at her blankly.

"Yes, professor. I asked you if there had ever been any errors discovered in any of the Hogwarts textbooks. After deducting five points from Gryffindor because I asked the question, you said that if anyone could ever demonstrate that there was erroneous information in any of our books, you would award the student twenty-five points per error identified."

"I see..." The expression in Snape's dark eyes was difficult to read. For an absurd moment, Harry could have sworn it was amusement, but then he brushed the bizarre idea aside.

"And what error have you identified, Miss Granger, by entering a professor's office without permission?" Snape asked softly.

"Two errors, sir," replied Hermione politely. "First, that it _is_ actually possible to apparate within Hogwarts."

"You _apparated_ into my office?" McGonagall looked baffled. "But you are both much too young to apparate, and you have never even learnt _how_."

"We did not actually apparate into your office ourselves, Professor," put in Harry hurriedly. "Someone else apparated into your office at our suggestion, and that person opened the locked door for us from the inside so we could confirm that the apparition had actually taken place. We... we did not want any other students to observe the apparition, you see, in case it were to give them ideas, so we thought it was best to have someone apparate into a teacher's office at a time when we believed it would be empty."

"Really?" Professor McGonagall looked thoughtfully at him for a moment. "Well, that _would _explain how you came to be inside a room locked with an unbreakable locking spell, I suppose. But _who _apparated within the school, and how?"

"A house-elf, professor," said Harry. "The magic of house-elves is different from that of wizards, so they are able to get around some of the enchantments put in place within Hogwarts. But please, professor, we do not want that particular elf to get in trouble and have to punish itself, so we would rather not give you a name."

"A house-elf?" Snape was interested now. "Yes... I suppose that might be possible. Perhaps there _is_ an exception to the general rule about apparition within Hogwarts, after all. Most disturbing! Imagine if one of the followers of the Dark Lord wished to assassinate Mr. Potter; all he would have to do is order his house-elf to apparate into Gryffindor Tower and stab Mr. Potter in his sleep..."

His glance lingered on Harry for a moment, and Harry had an uncomfortable feeling that Snape was envisioning the tragic night-time stabbing of Harry Potter in his mind.

"I don't think You-Know-Who's followers are interested enough in the lives of their house-elves to bother finding out how their magic works, sir," said Hermione coldly.

Snape regarded her for a moment. "Perhaps you are right. I should nevertheless alert the headmaster to this loophole in Hogwarts defenses, I suppose. And what was the second error you believe to have found in your schoolbooks, Miss Granger?"

Hermione pointed to the ancient book that lay open on McGonagall's desk. "The school records, sir. _Hogwarts, A History _states very clearly that students are always sorted in equal numbers into each of the four houses every year. But we have found two years when Hufflepuff House was missing a student, 1896 and 1991."

"I see. 1896 _and _1991_._" McGonagall was smiling now. Then she caught Snape's glance and said quickly. "Well, clever as you both may be, I cannot allow you to enter my office without permission, or to take our the confidential school records without my knowledge. That will be ten points from Gryffindor."

"_Ten points?_ For what amounts to breaking and entering? You cannot be serious, Minerva?" Snape looked annoyed.

Professor McGonagall looked at him over her spectacles. "Ten points, Severus. A blow to Gryffindor House, of course, but I dare say the extra credit points you promised Miss Granger will help us win the House Cup in the end."

Snape shot Harry and Hermione a look of extreme loathing. "All right, fifty points to Gryffindor," he said through gritted teeth. "Minus one point for that crooked tie, Mr. Potter."

"You'd better run along now, children," said Professor McGonagall quickly. "Now, Severus, about the catnip..."

Harry and Hermione left before Snape could think of anything else to deduct points for. As they closed the door behind them, they heard Snape's voice: "A curious anomaly, by the way, that drop in the number of Hufflepuff students during those two years. It is almost as if two students had vanished from the school."

And they heard McGonagall's reply, indistinct now behind the heavy oak door: "Very curious indeed, Severus."

...

Harry took Hermione's hand. "Let's see if Professor Sprout is back from tea."

"I suppose she is in one of the greenhouses," said Hermione absent-mindedly. "Snape is right, Harry, your tie _is _very crooked. Here, let me..."

"I like my ties crooked," said Harry impatiently. "Hermione, one of the girls who was sorted into Hufflepuff with Ariana Dumbledore was called Demeter Sprout. Perhaps she is related to Professor Sprout. Let's go and find out."

They found Professor Sprout in the far greenhouse. She was up to her elbows in soil; apparently she was in the process of re-potting a crooked little tree covered in large silver-blue shells.

She gave them a cheerful wave with an extremely dirty hand. "Hello, there! You two have arrived at the right moment; the buds of the barnacle tree are about to burst open."

"Barnacle tree?" Harry looked doubtfully at the shimmering shells. One by one the shells began to quiver. Then the two halves of each shell parted slowly, and little beaks began to poke out of the shells. Before long, the tree was covered in dozens of wet and bedraggled little goslings.

Harry reached out and touched one gently. The little bird looked at him with bright, black eyes and gave his finger an affectionate little peck.

"Barnacle geese!" exclaimed Hermione. "They are extraordinarily rare. How did you manage to get hold of a barnacle tree, Professor?"

Professor Sprout smiled as she reached for a box of worms and began feeding the birds. "My sister shipped it to me from the Isle of Man where she lives. There are still a few wild barnacle trees left there. My whole family has always loved plants and trees."

"Professor?" said Harry shyly. "We came to ask you about a member of your family, actually. We came across a reference to a Hogwarts student from the past, a girl called Demeter Sprout. She was in Hufflepuff."

Professor Sprout beamed at him. "Great-aunt Demeter! Yes, indeed, she was in Hufflepuff, just like me. I still remember how pleased she was when I told her that I had been sorted into Hufflepuff, her old house. Unfortunately, she passed away before I was made head of Hufflepuff. Too bad - that would have made her so proud!"

"Did she tell you a lot of stories about the students who were in Hufflepuff in her time?" asked Harry softly.

Professor Sprout put the box of worms away and wiped her hands on her apron. "Oh, dear me, yes. Oh, the tales she could tell from the old days!" She chuckled. "Little Augusta Moon could have taught the Weasley twins a thing or two about pranks, apparently. What an absolute terror she used to be! That was before she became Mrs. Longbottom, of course. Neville's grandmother is quite a solemn lady these days. "

"Professor, do you recall your great-aunt mentioning the headmaster's sister, Ariana Dumblededore?" Harry held his breath.

"Ariana Dumbledore?" Professor Sprout was silent for a moment. Then she muttered: "Now where did you two hear of _her, _I wonder?"

"She left Hogwarts rather suddenly, didn't she?" said Hermione innocently. "Just like Sally-Anne Perks."

"Sally-Anne Perks? Who is that?" Professor Sprout sounded vaguely puzzled. "I have never heard of _her_, but Ariana Dumbledore did indeed leave school very suddenly, poor child."

She sighed and shook her head. "I don't think the headmaster would like it if you go about talking of Ariana; it's such a painful subject to him. So this is just between us, mind you. No one seems to remember little Ariana any more. But I remember her name, of course, from the stories great-aunt Demeter used to tell. Ariana was a sweet little girl, but she suffered from some sort of mental illness. There was a terrible accident soon after she arrived here, and the family had to pull her out of school. Apparently, a group of boys had been teasing her and her friend Amaryllis, and Ariana became furious. She lost complete control over her magic and harmed one of the boys, Cygnus Black, very badly. From what I've heard about him, I dare say he deserved what he got, but the Dumbledore family found it too dangerous to keep Ariana at Hogwarts any longer. She was only here for a week or so, poor girl. She died a few years later. So sad it was! She was such a pretty little thing, too! She had blue eyes, just like her brother Albus..."

"How... how do you know what she looked like?" Harry frowned. "Did your great-aunt describe her to you, or did you ever see her picture?"

Professor Sprout shook her head sadly. "Oh, I've seen her portrait, of course."

"There's a portrait of Ariana? Where?" Harry felt his heart fluttering. "Here at Hogwarts?"

"No, in in the Hog's Head pub in Hogsmeade, in the upstairs room." Professor Sprout sighed. "Poor Albus. What a terrible loss it must have been."

"I see..." Harry whispered. "Thank you, Professor. We should be going now."

"Any time, my dear boy. The barnacle geese will be ready to detach from the tree tomorrow; you should come back and see them when they begin to fly." She grinned. "Not many people realize that some birds grow on trees, you know."

...

It was beginning to grow dark out as Harry and Hermione emerged from Honeydukes under the invisibility cloak and set course for the Hog's Head. Harry had half expected Hermione to object to missing a whole afternoon of homework, but she had slipped quietly under the cloak with him and accompanied him through the secret passage without a word.

The Hog's Head was filled with a strange assortment of customers, many of them hooded and cloaked. Harry caught sight of a few grotesque faces of figures that appeared to be the unnatural offspring of goblins and hags, and others who seemed to have more than a little troll blood in their veins. Harry and Hermione tiptoed silently through the grubby room, still invisible under the cloak, and found their way to a ramshackle staircase in the back. The steps creaked a bit under their feet, but the customers at the Hog's Head seemed to preoccupied with their own dark musings to notice.

At the top of the stairs was a large, cheerless sitting room. Above an unlit fireplace hung a portrait of a little girl with blond hair. Harry stared up at it, breathlessly.

_Sally-Anne Perks. _She looked just as sweet and bewildered as she had on the day of the sorting. "Hello? Is anyone there?" the portrait said softly.

Harry pulled the invisibility cloak off and looked up at the familiar face of the little girl.

"Ariana Dumbledore?" he whispered.

The portrait nodded. "How nice to see someone," she said sweetly. "I was getting bored."

"Ariana..." Harry tried to keep his voice steady. "We are Hogwarts students. Did you ever go to Hogwarts, Ariana?"

The girl in the portrait looked a little nervous. "Just for a little bit. There was an accident, you see, and they said I had to leave. Amaryllis cried and cried, but they said it wasn't safe to keep me there any more."

"Did you ever come back to Hogwarts later on, Ariana?" asked Hermione softly.

"Later on?" Ariana's portrait looked confused. "No, I never came back to Hogwarts after the accident. Albus went, though, and Aberforth. I wish I could have gone with them..." Her expression grew wistful.

Harry felt his head spinning. _This was Sally-Anne, as he had seen her at the sorting, and yet Ariana had never been back to Hogwarts since 1896._.. How was this possible?

"Ariana," he whispered. "I don't understand this. I don't understand about Sally-Anne..."

Ariana's pale little face lit up. "Oh, you know about Sally-Anne Perks?"

"What...?" Harry stared at her. "Ariana, what do you know about Sally-Anne Perks?"

Ariana glanced around the room, as if to make sure they were not overheard. Then said in a whisper: "Don't tell anyone. _I am Sally-Anne Perks._"

Harry felt Hermione shiver suddenly by his side, and he put his arm around her. Hermione stared at the portrait, her face pale. "But I thought you were Ariana Dumbledore," she said hoarsely. "How can you be Sally-Anne if you are Ariana?"

The portrait giggled. "Funny, isn't it? Albus doesn't want me to talk about it. He used to be so annoyed when I pretended to be Sally-Anne. But it was such a fun game, you see. I saw the Muggle children in the village where I lived pretend to be witches, and they made up all sorts of fantastic names for themselves. And then I thought that it might be fun to pretend to be a Muggle. I used to make believe I was a little Muggle girl who lived in a non-magical house with a stove you would light with matches and floors you would scrub with brushes. I even made up a Muggle name for myself: Sally-Anne Perks. I thought it sounded like such a pretty Muggle name. But Albus didn't like it when I played at being a Muggle; he said it wasn't dignified."

She looked a little melancholy at the thought.

"I think it was a lovely game, Ariana," said Hermione kindly, and Ariana smiled happily.

"Ariana," whispered Harry. "Did you ever pretend that Sally-Anne went to Hogwarts?"

"To Hogwarts?" Ariana shook her head. "No, that would have been silly. She is a Muggle, so she couldn't have gone to Hogwarts."

"But I saw her at Hogwarts!" Harry burst out. "She was sorted into Hufflepuff, and she looked exactly like you..."

Ariana's gentle blue eyes looked at him in bewilderment. "But that's not possible," she said softly. "Sally-Anne was just pretend. She was never a real person."

"But I _saw_ her..."

"Perhaps," said Ariana dreamily, "you are a little _unbalanced, _just like me. You'd better try to keep it secret, or they will send you home, too."


	10. Chapter 10

The Hog's Head seemed even gloomier now in the deepening evening shadows. Harry and Hermione wove their way, invisibly, through the maze of rickety tables and sagging benches towards the door. More guests had arrived now, but the atmosphere in the pub was still dreary and forlorn. Something about the large, dimly lit room struck Harry as unnatural. For a moment, he couldn't quite put his finger on it; then he realized that there should have been a murmur of voices where so many were gathered inside on a chilly evening. Instead, a heavy, brooding silence lay over the room, only broken by whispers and the occasional thud of a glass against a table.

Two dark-clad figures huddled over a table in the far corner. But wasn't that-?

"Look over there!" Harry breathed in Hermione's ear. "In the corner. Snape and Lupin! What are they doing here? Who would have thought that they are friends outside school?"

"I don't think they look particularly friendly," whispered Hermione back.

They walked noiselessly under the invisibility cloak to the corner where the two men sat and drank fire-whiskey. Snape and Lupin spoke to each other in a whisper, even though the table next to them was empty. Harry and Hermione slid quietly down on the bench at the empty table. Harry made sure they were still completely covered by the cloak. Snape froze for a moment. He turned around rapidly and glared in their direction. But then, apparently satisfied that no one was near, he turned back to Lupin. Hermione was right; there was nothing very amiable about their conversation.

"So you expect me to believe that you know nothing whatsoever about Sirius Black's whereabouts? He was one of your best friends in school. Or did you think I had forgotten?" Snape's voice was distinctly frosty.

The traitor Sirius Black had been Lupin's friend? Harry tried to imagine the shabby mild-mannered teacher laughing in the Great Hall with the mad wild-eyed convict from the wanted posters. But perhaps it made sense; Black and Lupin had both been friends with his father, so of course they must have been close to each other as well. Harry tried to imagine what Lupin must have felt when his friend turned murder and traitor. He shuddered. No wonder Lupin looked so tired and careworn these days, with his traitorous friend on the loose!

Lupin took a large gulp of his fire-whiskey and glared at Snape. His voice was slurred, as if he had been drinking for a while. "Sirius and I were close friends in school, yes, but our friendship took a sharp downturn when he betrayed James and Lily Potter to Voldemort and caused their deaths. Or had you forgotten about that part? I can assure you, I will kill the traitor with my bare hands the moment I set eyes on him."

"I wonder..." said Snape softly. He sounded curiously sober.

Lupin sighed heavily. "Listen, Severus, I understand that you are concerned about keeping Harry safe now that Black is on the loose, but please understand that you and I are on the same side. Thank you for inviting me for a drink, although I understand now that your intention was merely to loosen my tongue."

He suddenly frowned and looked into his glass. "Wait a minute. Did you put veritaserum in my drink?"

"Of course not," said Snape smoothly.

Lupin shook his head wearily. "There is no need for this interrogation, I assure you. The notion that I would somehow assist Sirius Black is absurd. Good God, Severus, don't you know how much Harry means to me? I would go to any lengths to keep him safe from harm and keep that traitorous assassin away from him."

"You only met the boy a few months ago," said Snape coldly. "I find it difficult to believe that you have become so terribly attached to the brat in such a short time."

Lupin shook his head and stared into his fire-whiskey. "I may have met Harry only recently," he whispered, "but it feels like I have known him all my life. He is _James, _you see, my dearest friend miraculously come back to life. The first time I saw Harry, I thought I was hallucinating. I still have a photograph of James, taken when he was thirteen years old, the same age Harry is now. The first time I looked at Harry, I thought for a moment that he _was _James; that by some rare and unknown magic he had managed to step out of the photograph and into the world of Hogwarts..."

Under the cloak, Harry could hear Hermione draw her breath sharply. Fortunately, the two professors were too immersed in their conversation to hear her.

"He _is_James, isn't he? Just as arrogant and devil-may-care as his father." There was a snarl in Snape's voice now. But then the potions master added, softly, almost as an afterthought: "But his eyes are so remarkably like his mother's... Have you ever noticed that, Remus?"

The two men looked at each other across the table for a while. Something seemed to pass between them that Harry could not understand. Then Lupin put his hand on Snape's arm and whispered: "No one can bring back the dead, Severus."

"I suppose not." Harry thought he saw the potions master's hand tremble as he raised his glass to his lips and drained it in one gulp.

Lupin waved at the barman, who came over and slammed new drinks wordlessly down before the two men. When the barman was out of earshot, Lupin said quietly: "The other day, Harry asked me about bringing the dead back."

Snape's eyebrows shot up. "Really? Taking an interest in the dark arts, is he?"

Lupin smiled at little. "He concealed his question as a riddle, but I think what he was actually trying to ask me is if there is a way to bring the dead back to life. It took me a little while to realize what he was up to. Poor boy... It must have been desperately hard for him, growing up without his parents. His Muggle relatives are very unpleasant, I understand."

"Are they? I didn't know that." Snape sounded surprised. "I wonder why the headmaster never mentioned that to me."

"Perhaps," said Lupin, glaring at the other teacher across the table, "Professor Dumbledore was under the impression that you didn't care."

"I see." There was no emotion in Snape's soft voice. He merely stared into his drink as if it were some particularly fascinating potion.

"I can't blame the Harry for longing for the parents he has never known, for wanting to find out if there is a magic that can bring them back. If only there was! But we both know that there is no power on earth that can overcome death." Lupin drank deeply from his glass. "If it had been possible to bring the dead back, I suppose we would all have done it."

"I suppose we would have," said Snape quietly and drained his glass.

...

The sun was setting, blood-red, at the horizon as Harry and Hermione stepped out into the chilly evening air.

"So the pale little girl I saw being sorted into Hufflepuff was merely the figment of a dead girl's imagination." Harry tried to keep his voice steady. "Perhaps I am unbalanced, after all..."

He felt Hermione squeeze his hand under the cloak. Her voice was calm as she answered: "Don't be absurd, Harry. Sally-Anne's name appeared in the school records when we used the time turner, didn't it? How could an imaginary girl show up in the Hogwarts records ? And how could a little girl's fantasy self leave a blank spot behind on the Maruders' Map? There _was _someone who called herself Sally-Anne at Hogwarts two years ago, and she was sorted into Hufflepuff. There _has_ to be a logical explanation for all of this. Let's sit down and think things over for a moment."

Harry felt strangely comforted by Hermione's calm composure. Something about her dispassionate logic seemed as soothing as the crisp evening air that caressed his burning cheeks.

Hermione led him over to a bench outside Honeydukes. The window of the sweet shop was still lit up, although there were few customers about at this hour. The magical window display looked bright and enticing in the fading light of dusk. The street was empty. _Even _we _aren't here,_ thought Harry to himself. _We are invisible, vanished under the cloak, just two disembodied voices in the autumn evening..._

"Let's try to think logically about this," said Hermione gently by his side. "The girl you saw two years ago, the girl who was sorted into Hufflepuff under the name "Sally-Anne Perks" looked just like Ariana Dumbledore. And Ariana said that she used pretend to be a girl named Sally-Anne Perks. So it would seem to make sense, therefore, that Sally-Anne and Ariana are the same person."

"But Ariana's portrait said that Sally-Anne was never real," whispered Harry. "Everyone else told me that Sally-Anne wasn't real, that I had just imagined her. Dumbledore, McGonagall, Ron, the Hufflepuff students... At first I thought they were wrong. But now even _Sally-Anne herself _says that Sally-Anne wasn't real..." He shook his head, bewildered.

"But you saw Sally-Anne Perks at Hogwarts, Harry, and so did Moaning Myrtle and some of the other ghosts. _Someone _was at Hogwarts under the name Sally-Anne. And whoever this Sally-Anne Perks was, she remembered Ariana's friend Amaryllis," continued Hermione calmly. "And she knew her way around Hogwarts better than any new student should. Sally-Anne looked precisely like Ariana, remembered Ariana's friend, and bore a name invented by Ariana. Doesn't it make sense, then, to assume that somehow she _was_ Ariana? And yet, how could she have been? After all, Ariana died ninety years ago..."

Hermione touched the golden chain at her neck. "What if Ariana have had a time-turner like this one?" she whispered. "Could she have traveled through time, somehow? Perhaps she left Hogwarts in 1896 and arrived, moments later, at Hogwarts in 1991. Time travel may explain her confusion, and perhaps also why Sally-Anne vanished from Hogwarts after only a week. McGonagall warned me that it is dangerous to travel too far in time, that time itself may begin to unravel. But what if it were the time-traveler, rather than time, that unravelled? Perhaps Ariana traveled so far into the future that she herself began to fall apart, to fade. Perhaps Ariana simply did not belong in this time..."

Harry thought about it for a moment. He imagined the little girl from the portrait standing still in the middle of the Great Hall, time swirling around her...

"But why _this _time?" He shook his head slowly. "If Ariana were traveling through time, why would she travel ninety-five years into the future? Why ninety-five and not a hundred? Or ninety-nine?"

Hermione frowned slightly. "I never thought of that. Ninety-five years... Ninety-nine is the product of two magical numbers, nine and eleven, and a hundred is ten, the number of the _tetractys,_ multiplied by itself. Ninety-five seems to be a random number devoid of all significance. Perhaps there is some other reason why she would arrive at Hogwarts precisely in 1991."

"But nothing significant happened at Hogwarts in 1991, did it?"

"Oh, I don't know, Harry." Hermione smiled slightly. "Wasn't that the year when the famous Boy Who Lived came to Hogwarts?"

"Are you suggesting that she came to Hogwarts to meet _me_? But I never even knew her or spoke to her..."

"No," said Hermione thoughtfully, "but you _remembered_ her..."

"But Ariana Dumbledore is dead," whispered Harry. "She died ninety years ago. She _can't _have traveled through time. You can't travel through time after you are dead, can you? And even her portrait said she never returned to Hogwarts after the accident she caused."

"The portrait, yes." Hermione was silent for a moment. Then she said thoughtfully: "But a portrait is not a real person after all, Harry. A portrait only remembers what happened to a person while that person was still alive. So a portrait would not be able to remember what happened after..."

"After the person is dead?" Harry shivered. _Had_ Sally-Anne been Ariana, returned from the dead?

"But there is no way to bring back the dead, is there?" he said hesitantly. "Even the sorcerer's stone can only prolong life, not bring the dead back..." A sudden image flashed vividly in his mind: The two-faced man that was the timid Quirrell and the dread Voldemort in one, standing before him in an underground chamber. Hadn't Voldemort himself vanished for years after he had failed to kill Harry, lingering formlessly in some unknown realm before attaching himself to the stuttering Hogwarts teacher? He had needed the sorcerer's stone to bring him back to reality, back to a full life in the flesh. Had Ariana been a lingering spirit as well, brought back to life by the sorcerer's stone? No, Ariana Dumbledore had died, not just vanished. Or so everyone believed...

"All right, perhaps Sally-Anne can't have been Ariana herself, since Ariana was dead. But maybe Sally-Anne was a memory of Ariana come to life," said Hermione softly. "We know that people who have died can still linger among the living in certain ways: As ghosts, as portraits, photographs, chocolate frog cards..."

They turned and looked at the colorful display in the window of the candy store behind them. A chocolate fountain bubbled merrily in the middle, surrounded by a miniature Hogsmeade carved entirely out of candy. Black liquorice dementors appeared to be fleeing in terror from the splashing chocolate. Cozy gingerbread shops and delicate coconut ice cottages were dusted with a fine layer of sugar that resembled newly fallen snow. But the seasons were mixed up, for candied violets and geraniums bloomed behind mint picket fences. Chocolate frogs hopped merrily through the streets, whose multicolored cobblestones were made of Every-Flavored Beans. A collection of chocolate frog cards Ron would have died for was lined up at the outskirts of the candied village. Dumbledore's card was among them; he was engaged in what appeared to be animated conversation with the the cards of John Dee and Gesar of Ling, and they were all laughing as if someone had just told an excellent joke.

But the figures of great wizards in the chocolate frog cards never actually spoke to the cards' owners; Harry knew that much. That was not Dumbledore in the shop window, but merely a piece of cardboard bewitched to look like the headmaster of Hogwarts. A chocolate frog card was a simple depiction of a person, nothing more. A wizarding photograph involved more complex magic that a chocolate frog card; it captured the person as he or she was at the moment the photograph was taken. A person in a photograph could move about, smile or frown at you. But a portrait was created by even more advanced magic; a portrait could speak with the voice of the person it depicted, have a conversation with the living, and recall a vanished person's life.

"I wonder," he said slowly, "if there exists a magic similar to that which makes a portrait speak and remember, only even more advanced... Something that would allow the person remembered to walk among the living, in three dimensions, rather than being trapped on a flat canvas..."

"But the Sorting Hat said that Sally-Anne was a living girl, not a portrait come alive... What other magic is there, Harry, that can bring a memory to life?" Hermione sounded puzzled now.

Harry looked into the bright shop window. The empty darkened street behind them was mirrored in the window, a darker reality superimposed on the merry candy town. Harry pulled the invisibility cloak off and searched for his own reflection in the brightly lit window. There he was! His face hovered indistinctly, like a ghost, among the chocolate frog cards and packets of cockroach cluster. Messy dark hair, round glasses... His face-? He looked more closely. _No, _he thought, _not my face. This is my father's face. I see James Potter's reflection in the window. I cannot see my eye color clearly in the window, perhaps my eyes are blue, rather than green... My hair has fallen over my scar; perhaps there is no scar. Perhaps this is not my reflection, but my father's..._

He reached out, hesitantly, and touched his reflection in the glass. _I am touching my father's reflection. Who says you can't bring the dead back to life? I _am _the memory of my father, reflected in a magical window..._

Suddenly, he froze. He stared, bewitched, at his own image in the glass. He traced the face in the window with a trembling hand, and the reflection reached its hand out as if to touch him back.

"Harry?" Hermione whispered his name. "What is wrong? What are you looking at?"

"My father," said Harry hoarsely. "Me. Both of us. _Sometimes we don't see the truth because it is too simple..." _He sank down on the bench, dazed.

_Finally, he understood who Sally-Anne Perks had been._


	11. Chapter 11

**_[Author's Note: Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the reviews and comments! Some of the suggested solutions to the mystery of Sally-Anne's disappearance were brilliant- I hope those reviewers write their own mystery stories! I would love to read them. Yes, this is the final chapter and the solution to this mystery. For a different take on what happened to Sally-Anne, stand by for my upcoming fic __The Book of Abraham the Mage_.]**

...

"Harry?" whispered Hermione. "Are you all right?"

"I don't know..." Harry heard voices in the distance and hurriedly pulled the invisibility cloak over them both. He could make out the pale oval of Hermione's face under the cloak, even though it was getting dark now. _How odd, _he thought, _that we can still see each other, even though we are both invisible. I wonder if those who are invisible to us are somehow visible to each other as well? _

He found Hermione's hand, small and warm, under the cloak and pulled his invisible companion into the bright candy shop. Her breathed against her ear: "Let's get back before the shop closes; we don't want to get stuck out here without access to the tunnel."

Honeydukes was empty at this hour except for a solitary employee, a young wizard in honey colored robes with a glittering golden H on his chest. He blinked in surprise at the slight rustling of candy wrappers as Harry and Hermione tried to walk unnoticed past the overfilled shelves and tables. _We are not here, _thought Harry, and the young wizard appeared to agree with him, for he merely shrugged and went back to sampling the toffees surreptitiously.

As they wove their back to Hogwarts through the narrow underground stone tunnel, Hermione whispered: "Harry, what was it that happened to you outside the candy shop? You looked as if you had seen a ghost."

"I think I finally realized the truth about Sally-Anne." His voice echoed strangely in the deserted tunnel. Harry paused and looked around. Where were they exactly? It was difficult to tell, since there was nothing to distinguish one part of the ancient stone passage from another. He pulled the Marauders' Map out of his pocket and studied it in the flickering light from his wand. But there were no dots on the map marked "Harry Potter" or "Hermione Granger". Most of the passage they were in lay outside the map; only the entrance to the underground tunnel and the first few feet beyond were visible on the yellowed parchment. _We are nowhere, _he thought. _We are in an indeterminate passage between two knowable locations, lost in the space between Hogsmeade and Hogwarts. _

He shook the strange thought out if his mind and turned to Hermione. "Perhaps we should stop here for a moment, Hermione. Maybe we should talk here, before we get back to school. It's difficult to speak privately there."

_And perhaps, _he thought to himself, _it is easier to speak of Sally-Anne here, in this place that is neither here nor there, but somewhere betwixt and between, just like Sally-Anne herself._

Hermione nodded, and they sat down together on the rough stone floor of the passage.

"You know the truth about Sally-Anne?" Hermione's eyes were large and dark in her pale face.

Harry swallowed. "I think I do..."

"Were Sally-Anne and Ariana the same person?"

"Yes. Or no... I suppose that depends on how you look at it..." Harry caught sight of Hermione's exasperated expression and smiled. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be so vague. Yes, Sally-Anne _was_ Dumbledore's sister Ariana, even though Ariana died long ago."

"How... how is that possible?" He could hear that Hermione was trying to keep her voice steady. "The dead can't come back to life, can they?"

"Back to life? No... or perhaps yes... in a manner of speaking..." Harry paused for a moment, struggling to put his sudden strange insight into words. "Ariana Dumbledore returned to Hogwarts, in a fashion, after ninety-five years. But why_ then?_ In order to understand _how_ she came to be there, we first need to understand what it was that made her return to the school at that precise point in time. What happened in the early autumn of 1991 that made her come back?"

"You arrived at Hogwarts. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived."

"And so did you, Hermione, and Ron, and lots of other people. And so did the two-faced Quirrell, who was hiding a terrible secret under his turban."

Hermione reflected for a minute. "But you and I and Ron arrived at Hogwarts simply because we were wizards who had turned eleven; we came for the same reason children have come to Hogwarts for hundreds of years. There is nothing extraordinary about our arrival, even if there was - and is - something extraordinary about _you_. But Quirrell..."

"Quirrell had accepted his new post and came to Hogwarts that September because there was something there that his master desperately wanted."

"_The sorcerer's stone,_" whispered Hermione. "Sally-Anne came to Hogwarts shortly after the legendary sorcerer's stone had been brought there. The magical stone that has the ability to produce the elixir of life, to prolong life indefinitely, the stone You-Know-Who wanted so badly... And for a few weeks, before the beginning of term, Dumbledore had the stone in his possession at Hogwarts. But... but Ariana was _dead, _wasn't she? Surely, not even the sorcerer's stone can awaken the dead, Harry?"

Harry shook his head, slowly. "No, I don't think it can. I think the sorcerer's stone played a role in Ariana's return, but it was not what brought her back."

"I don't understand." How strangely young and vulnerable Hermione looked when she was puzzled!

"Hermione, try to think about what Dumbledore must have been doing in the last few weeks before school began that September," said Harry softly.

Hermione closed her eyes for a moment, thinking back. "Well, he must have been busy getting everything ready for the beginning of term, I suppose. He must have been arranging the schedules for the coming term, talking to the other teachers. And... _And he would have been hiding the sorcerer's stone. _Of course, that's what he was doing, right before we arrived. And then the Hogwarts teachers would have surrounded the stone with the seven obstacles we faced in our first year: Hagrid would have brought the three-headed Fluffy, Professor Sprout would have provided the Devil's Snare, someone would have enchanted the flying keys... Perhaps Madam Hooch? Yes, it must have been her; there were broomsticks all along the wall of that chamber, and that particular obstacle _was _a Quidditch challenge of sorts, wasn't it? Professor McGonagall was the one to put the enchanted chess board in place, of course. And then there was the troll. I suppose Quirrell himself brought the troll in." She shuddered a little. "I still dream about that troll at night sometimes. And Professor Snape would have provided the riddle of the potions."

"Funny, isn't it, that Snape should provide a riddle of logic?" Harry muttered as he thought of the sneering potions master. "He doesn't always strike me as terribly cool and rational."

Hermione laughed. "Oh, the riddle of the potions wasn't all that logical Harry. In fact, the riddle was unsolvable."

"_What_?" Harry blinked in surprise. "But you solved it."

"Of course I did," said Hermione dreamily, "but not by logic alone. You see, Harry, the way the riddle was written, there were _two_ possible answers, not just one."

_Two possible answers?_ _Now that's more like Snape! _Harry thought to himself. _The eternally ambivalent potions master... Even his logic puzzles lack a single definite answer. _Her looked curiously at Hermione. "So you just _guessed?_" Somehow, that didn't strike him as something Hermione would do.

"Of course not. I used logic to narrow the answer down to the two possible solutions, and then I used my knowledge of _Snape _to determine the correct answer. It was a logical riddle that logic alone could not solve. But in the end I realized that Snape would have preferred the more symmetrical of the two possible arrangements of the potions bottles. Or perhaps you haven't noticed that Professor Snape always arranges potions ingredients symmetrically in the classroom as well?"

Harry shook his head. "No, I never noticed that. But Quirrell made his way past the riddle of the potions as well. How did _he_ do it?"

Hermione smiled. "He must have been reduced to guessing. I don't think he understood Snape well enough to be able to determine which arrangement of the bottles would have appealed to him the most. Unfortunately, he guessed correctly. And then there was the seventh obstacle..."

"The final riddle of them all," whispered Harry. "The Mirror of Erised, the obstacle Quirrell and his dark master could not overcome."

"Put there by Dumbledore." Hermione looked at him, an expression of wonder in her dark eyes. "_The Mirror of Erised, the Mirror of Desire._ I am beginning to understand, Harry... Perhaps Dumbledore looked into the enchanted mirror of Erised that September and saw his dead sister, the one he had lost so long ago, but never been able to forget."

"But the mirror wasn't in the chamber right away," remembered Harry. "It was somewhere else first, in a sort of storage room, when I found it at Christmastime. Dumbledore must have put it in the underground chamber later. Or perhaps he moved it around... I wonder why. It's almost as if he _wanted_ me to find the mirror. Thinking back, I don't think that it was a coincidence that I stumbled into it that night. I wonder if the sorcerer's stone was already hidden inside the mirror then?"

"I have never seen the mirror, Harry." Hermione's voice was hoarse. "Tell me what it is like."

"The Mirror of Erised?" Harry sighed softly. "It's... It's so lovely that it takes your breath away. When you see it, it feels as if there is nothing else in the room beside that mirror. Or perhaps nothing else in the whole world... It grabs hold of your heart and holds you spellbound. When you look into it, you will see whatever your heart desires, even if you never knew what it was until that moment. The mirror knows you better than you know yourself."

Harry's voice faltered as he recalled the faces of his father and mother in the mirror. "And the strangest thing about the mirror," he continued in a whisper, "is that everything in it appears so _real_, as if the mirror is a doorway into a different world where everything is possible. And you think to yourself: _If only I could figure out how to get to the other side..._ It is so easy to forget that there is no other side; the mirror is nothing but a glittering surface. It does what all mirrors do: It reflects the person standing in front of it."

His voice trailed off for a moment, and he felt tears stinging in his eyes. Then he whispered: "When I looked into the mirror, I saw my father and mother. They appeared so wondrously real that I thought for a moment that it was possible to bring them back to life. It seemed to me that they were still alive, you see, in that elusive reality hovering right behind the surface of the mirror. If only there was a way to bring them from _that_ reality to this one... "

"I wish there was a way, Harry," said Hermione softly and stroked his cheek. Her touch was gentle, almost imperceptible, but it left Harry feeling strangely breathless.

"What do you think _you_ would see in the mirror, Hermione?" he asked curiously, looking into her brown eyes. "Yourself holding a perfect report card? No, you always get those, even without the mirror."

Hermione laughed. "Perhaps I _did_ desire perfect grades, when I first arrived here at eleven. But now... Perhaps I would see your parents, too, Harry. I wish you could have them back, so you wouldn't be lonely." Harry noticed the sudden flush on her cheeks, and he felt something stir in his heart, something that felt strangely sweet and terribly awkward at the same time. He almost wished that Ron had been there, to alleviate the awkwardness of that moment, and yet he was very happy that he wasn't...

"Do you think that's what happened in our first year, then?" Hermione continued softly. "Do you think Dumbledore looked into the mirror, saw his lost sister, and somehow managed to bring her out of the mirror-? How is that possible? How can you pull a dream out of the mirror and into the real world? How did he turn the memory of Ariana into a girl of flesh and blood?"

"Perhaps the same way I got the sorcerer's stone out of the mirror," said Harry slowly. "Remember that the mirror was enchanted so that only one who wished to _find _the legendary stone, but not use it for himself, would be able to pull it out of the mirror and into the real world. Perhaps Dumbledore first discovered that enchantment as he stood in front of the mirror, holding the stone he had to hide, and looked at the face of his dead sister. He must have wished desperately to bring her back to Hogwarts. Not for himself, but for _her_ sake... Ariana wanted to go back to Hogwarts after they had pulled her out of school, but she was never able to. Perhaps Dumbledore looked at her pale little face in the mirror and wished in his heart that she would be able to join the new students who were about to arrive at Hogwarts. And perhaps the same enchantment that allowed me to find the stone hidden in the mirror allowed him to find the little girl hidden there as well."

"And then she stepped out of the mirror..." Hermione's voice faltered. "Because he so desperately wanted her to be real, for _her_ sake, rather than for himself. He reached in to the mirror and got his sister back. But I don't suppose he could tell anyone what he had done, so he gave the little girl a different name. He called her "Sally-Anne" because that is who _she _wanted to be... Yes, that must have been how it happened, Harry. But was she the real Ariana, or just Dumbledore's memory, the girl who came out of the mirror?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she was both..." Harry whispered. He reached out, took Hermione's hand and pulled her to her feet. "Let's go and see Dumbledore, Hermione."

She nodded, and they walked silently together through the dim underground passage until they reached the doorway that led them back into the bright and familiar world of Hogwarts again.

...

They found Dumbledore working at his desk in the warm golden light of a flickering lamp. The rest of his familiar office lay hidden in the deepening evening shadows.

"Ah, come in, young Gryffindors!" Dumbledore put his quill down and beamed at them as they entered. "What a welcome distraction from the tedious, but alas so necessary task of writing the annual report to the Ministry of Magic on the school budget. I am afraid even I cannot perform the sort of magic they seem to be expecting these days. What can I do for you this evening?" He motioned for them to sit, and they found two chairs at the outer edge of the golden circle of light. Something stirred in the shadows behind them, but Harry could not see what it was. Perhaps Fawkes was moving, invisibly, in his dark corner.

"Sir..." Harry looked at the familiar face of the kind old headmaster. He had so many questions to ask, but he didn't know how to begin.

"What's the matter, Harry?" Dumbledore scrutinized him over the edge of his half-moon glasses.

"You... sir..." Harry couldn't get the words out.

He felt relieved when Hermione spoke instead. "We wanted to ask you about your sister Ariana, sir, and about the girl who stepped out of the Mirror of Erised."

"Ah. So you know about that." Dumbledore sat motionless for a moment.

_How terribly old and frail he looks all of a sudden, _thought Harry. _He has that fragile, half-absent look about him that very old people have before they die, when their grip on this world is becoming lighter and lighter with each passing day..._

"Sir, are you all right?" Harry touched the headmaster's old, wrinkled hand.

'What-?" Dumbledore looked strangely lost for a moment, but then a shadow of a familiar smile flitted across his face. "I should have known that the two of you would not be able to rest until you knew... It's always so much easier to deceive adults than children. Children always want to _know_."

"Professor McGonagall knows," said Harry in a low voice, "even if she wouldn't tell us."

"Ah, yes. Professor McGonagall, my partner in crime..." Dumbledore chuckled a little, but there was a trembling note to his laughter. "Poor Minerva! When I confessed to her what I had done and asked for her help in covering up my terrible mistake, she gave me a lecture so severe and furious that the portraits on the wall had to cover their ears. Fortunately, this means that they missed the gist of our conversation. You may not be aware of this, but Professor McGonagall has a rather impressive vocabulary which includes some very colorful Scottish expressions." He smiled ruefully. "But in the end she took pity on me and agreed to help me cover up the evidence of my transgression. She does have a warm heart, you see, and she knew that I acted out of love, however misguided my actions may have been."

"What happened to the girl from the mirror, sir?" asked Harry hesitantly. "Where did she go when she vanished? Was she real?"

"Ah, Harry. Where do vanished persons go?" Dumbledore's voice was barely above a whisper. "Into nothingness, I suppose... Was she real? I'm not sure I know the answer to that, Harry. I suppose she was as real as our memories are..."

There was a faraway expression in his bright blue eyes, as if he was looking at something in the distance they could not see. For the first time, Harry noticed how very similar his eyes were to those of the little girl in the portrait.

"Memories can seem curiously real sometimes," Dumbledore said quietly. "My sister Ariana died ninety years ago. You would have thought that my memory of her would have grown fainter with time. But my recollection of my sister has not faded; it has only grown stronger and more vivid with each passing year. It is the memories we have of the living that begin to blur as we grow older, you see, but our recollections of the dead grow clearer and more luminous over time... My sister Ariana was only here at Hogwarts for a week, but I still recall with perfect clarity how she smiled when she entered the Great Hall arm in arm with her friend Amaryllis, and the way the afternoon sunlight fell golden on her hair as she walked down the front steps of the school. Sometimes I stare at the pale little faces of the first years about to be sorted at the beginning of each new year, and I remember what _her_ face looked like the day she was sorted into Hufflepuff. At times I look at the Hufflepuff students and imagine Ariana walking, invisibly, next to them. And I find myself thinking that _that_ little girl looks pleasant; she would make a good friend for Ariana, and then suddenly I remember that Ariana is dead..."

A tear trickled down his wrinkled face. "But then," he whispered, "a most curious thing happened. I found myself in front of the Mirror of Erised shortly before you both arrived at Hogwarts. There were strange rumors in the air that Lord Voldemort may not be dead after all, and my old friend Nicolas Flamel was terribly anxious about keeping the sorcerer's stone safe. I offered to hide it for him here at Hogwarts, and he readily accepted. I had found the perfect place to conceal the stone: The enchanted Mirror of Erised, in which we see our deepest desires. It was an ingenious hiding place, for desire is the one thing the Dark Lord does not know how to conquer. In fact, it _is_ his own desperate desire for immortality that made him into the dreaded Voldemort. The stone would be safe inside the mirror. And so it was that I found myself in front of the Mirror of Erised two years ago, about to hide the stone in the one place where Voldemort could never find it. But the mirror is powerful indeed, as you have no doubt discovered for yourself, Harry, and I could not resist looking into it for a brief moment. And what I saw took my breath away..."

His voice trembled. "She looked so real, you see, that I began to wonder if I had simply dreamt that she had died all those years ago. She smiled at me and said my name, and I could not help myself: I reached out to touch her, to find out if she was really _there. _And the the most miraculous thing happened: To my astonishment and delight, my hand found warm flesh inside the mirror. With a beating heart, I took hold of my sister's hand and pulled her out of the mirror, and she stepped out from the silver glass as easily as if she had simply crossed a threshold from one room into another. My sister, here at Hogwarts, a living girl of flesh and blood! I felt such joy that I couldn't care less whether she was real, or whether I had gone mad and was staring at a hallucination. Real or not, she was _here, _and that was all that mattered. Ariana was bewildered at first; she wondered where she was. But when I told her that she was back at Hogwarts, she laughed with joy. And so I came up with a plan. It was a lunatic's plan, but it seemed to perfectly reasonable and logical to me at the time. Ariana would enroll at Hogwarts; she would be sorted with the new students who were about to arrive at the school. I would bring her to London so she could take the Hogwarts express with the other children, and I would bewitch the Sorting Hat so it would sort her anew... Ariana was so excited about my crazed plan at first, and she laughed when I suggested her new name: Sally-Anne Perks. It was a wonderful new game to her, and she wanted to play along."

Dumbledore sighed heavily. "For a few mad days, I thought it would work... My head was full of wonderful plans for Ariana and for or future together: She would make friends with the little girls at Hogwarts, and I would help her with her classes. She was never terribly bright, but with my help she could surely pass her exams. And later I would find her a job, perhaps here at Hogwarts, so we could always be together..." His voice trailed off, and he sat silently for a moment.

"But it didn't work, did it?" Harry's whisper broke the silence.

Dumbledore shook his head slowly. He turned his face away from the lamplight, so Harry couldn't tell whether he was weeping. "No, Harry, it didn't work. In the beginning, Ariana played along happily, but then a gradual change came over her. She began to _wonder... _She began to ask would knock on my door at night, when everyone else was asleep, and she would ask me all these terrible questions I did not know how to answer: _Who am I? How can I be Ariana if Ariana is dead? Am I real, or am I just a memory, like the portraits on the wall?_ I tried to reassure her, to cheer her up, but she found no comfort in my answers. She grew more and more distressed and confused, in spite of my efforts to convince her that it didn't matter at all whether she was real; what mattered was that she was _here, _that we were together. But then one night, she no longer cried. She merely looked at me and said: "I am going back into the mirror now, Albus." I pleaded with her to reconsider, but she had made her mind up. And I understood then that the only thing that could alleviate the misery she felt was the one thing that would break my heart. But I agreed to do it; what else could I do? I loved her, you see, and I could not bear to see her so unhappy. So I led her back to the mirror, kissed her on the forehead one last time and said goodbye. She smiled then, for the first time in several days. And then she stepped back into the mirror and vanished."

"And did you ever... look for her there again? In the mirror?" Hermione's voice was unsteady.

Dumbledore shook his head. "I looked... Oh, yes, I looked, but I didn't see her. I stepped in front of the mirror a few times, but all I saw reflected in the glittering surface was an old man, who had perhaps grown a little wiser." He sighed softly. "At least, I hope so. But sometimes I still wonder what I would do if I ever discovered an even more powerful magic that could recall someone from the dead, a different sort of sorcerer's stone, perhaps. Would I have the wisdom to fling it aside, to toss it into the Forbidden Forest somewhere, or would I be tempted to use it? Even now I do not know the answer to that..."

"Why did you want everyone to forget about Sally-Anne?" whispered Harry. "Why didn't you want her to be remembered?"

Dumbledore looked down. His voice trembled slightly as he responded: "_There never was a Sally-Anne, Harry. _Sally-Anne was merely a dream who had entered reality for a fleeting moment. She was nothing but a little girl's fantasy and an old man's sorrow. She did not belong in this world, Harry. _She had to be forgotten. _Professor McGonagall argued with me when I asked for her help in modifying memories and school records in order to extinguish every trace of Sally-Anne's brief existence. She feels that it is necessary to remember our mistakes in order to avoid repeating them. But I thought that she underestimated the foolishness of the human heart: If others were to learn of what I had done, I was worried that they would try to repeat my error, rather than learn from it... In the end, she agreed to help me cover up the traces of my transgression."

"Not all traces, sir," said Hermione quietly. "Nothing can be entirely forgotten."

Dumbledore looked at her thoughtfully. "Perhaps not," he said softly. "But I trust the two of you will understand why you need to keep what you have learned to yourselves."

They both nodded wordlessly.

"But sir?" A sudden thought occurred to Harry. "There is one thing I don't understand."

"Just one?" Dumbledore smiled. "And what is that, Harry?"

"Why didn't you ask Snape to help you erase the memory of Sally-Anne? Why didn't you take him into your confidence as well? I thought you trusted him completely, sir."

"Ah." Dumbledore looked thoughtfully at Harry for a moment. "An excellent question... I _do _trust Professor Snape, Harry; I would trust him with my very life. And yet... I am not sure that I would trust him with the knowledge that our dreams and sorrows can step out of an enchanted mirror and into reality, if only for a few brief moments."

His glance lingered on Harry face, and then he asked softly: "Can I trust _you_ with that knowledge, Harry?"

"Yes, Professor."

At that moment, a resplendent light illuminated the shadows in the far corner. Fawkes the phoenix had burst into radiant flames of gold and crimson. For a moment he blazed, brilliantly, in the darkened room. But then his fiery splendor begun to fade; the flames grew dim and vanished into darkness. A few moments later, they heard a faint scratching sound, followed by a bewildered little squeak as the newborn phoenix stirred in the ashes.

Dumbledore made some soothing noises at the bird, who fluted softly back.

"Is he all right, sir?" Hermione sounded worried.

Dumbledore smiled. "Of course he is, Miss Granger. Fawkes has experienced this many time before. At least I think he has... I suppose only a philosopher could determine whether I am the owner of one long-lived but combustible bird, or a series of four hundred identical phoenixes who carry with them the recollection of the birds who have gone before..."

His bright blue eyes twinkled behind his spectacles. "I think you had better go now. I have a newborn phoenix to attend to, and I believe the two of you have been sorely missed. I had a visit a few hours ago from your friend Mr. Ronald Weasley and a very agitated house-elf. They were deeply concerned that you had missed both tea and dinner, and that you were nowhere to be found. Between them, they had come up with some fantastic theories to explain your mysterious disappearance. I believe some of their theories involved time travel, vampires, simulacra, and golems, among other things. You really should go and put their minds to rest."

Dumbledore flicked his wand, and the light from the lamp grew brighter. They could see the fledgling phoenix now, a forlorn little creature sitting in a heap of ashes. Dumbledore picked up the little bird and stroked it tenderly.

As Harry and Hermione walked to the door, a light silvery mist wafted towards them from a crack in an ancient cabinet. Harry reached out and touched an evanescent wisp of silver.

"What is this, sir?"

"What?" Dumbledore tore his glance reluctantly away from the little bird on his finger. "Oh, that. Just memories, Harry. Memories of the past... Perhaps I will show them to you some time. There is powerful magic in memories, you see."

...

_The End._


End file.
